new friends

hey!
back to seville, staying for the night at my parents home. came back from madrid riding the last ave [alta velocidad española]. sánchez gordillo, the SOC leader was sitting two rows away in the train. SOC [sindicato de obreros del campo] could be described as something similar to the MST in Brazil, but smaller and in spain.

my last day in mad was quite beatiful. Did a lot of talking - and some walking -. With Ana at breakfast, a squatter in Manresa, Catalonia, visiting in Madrid.

With Cristina, a radical feminist, one of the people at eskalera karakola an occupied feminist social center in lavapies. it´s been going on for 6 years. usually guys aren´t allowed, but they made an exception for me as an architect wanting to learn about their project. i told her i was feeling like a priest in a nun convent. Ended up at her home, meeting her girlfriend, and discussing los angeles´mike davis, and their strategy to convince the city to expropriate the historical building, renovate it, and eventually donate it to eskalera karakola to go on with their women center project. wouldn´t be the first time something like this would have been achieved in europe...

Finally, i returned to my own home, La Grieta, helped Sylvia clean up a bit and went out again for a last drink with Arancha. She is one of madrid´s squatter scene veterans. But it seems that the new form of making politics, has also reached the okupa movement. she is a young and beatiful woman who is as knowledgable about Deleuze and Guattari & Negri, as she is about Cronenberg and William Gibson, or Richard Stallman and the free software movement. Right now she is working on a seminar she will be teaching / facilitating on new flesh at madrid hack-lab, towards the end of the month. She was also telling me about a book... can´t remember the title, whose thesis is that all the wars and fights in West Asia respond to the struggle between dna-ists and cyborg-ists!!! And she even made me believe it is a reasonable and interesting book to study! And all this labyrinthine, inspiring and lucid mind, combined with a courageous capacity for action and organization.

Anyways, with Arancha, i felt this intense desire of becoming her friend. Someone you admire, respect and want to love and be close by and do all kinds of things with. Something that hadn´t happened to me so intensely since a long time ago, an almost adolescent feeling _ that makes me even a little self conscious. And even worse, this has happened more than once this weekend! -may this be the effect of the belicist environment, or maybe it is the effect of smoking bad grass, or a postmodern mojo??

it felt indeed, like some kind of friendship-infatuation... Anyways, it did make me feel very good and happy. I still do...

So, half of the project for the weekend really worked...

soon more, about our future projects in common... bsss _ osfa