By Ajok Deng

As a contributor to the Weaving the Streets project, I have been looking into the issue of collective memory and the reconstruction of identities in post-dictatorship Spain. My first two blog posts focused on Lavapiés, a multicultural neighborhood in Madrid, using street art as a medium for juxtaposing modern-day activities with the history of the Franco dictatorship. This third post focuses on Santander, a city where the present and the past exist simultaneously.

By Ajok Deng

In the Madrid neighborhood of Lavapiés, groups such as Mujeres Libres (Free Women) join anonymous street artists in expressing defiant resistance to the structures of patriarchy and the gendered violence that it generates. As part of our Weaving the Streets project, reporter Ajok Deng describes what she has been seeing on the walls, and in the streets, of Lavapiés.

By Ajok Deng

"Skulls and bones emerge from the ground beneath your feet. They peek right above the sidewalks and leave a chilling impression of what was once hidden." Ajok Deng joins our Weaving the Streets project with a report from Lavapiés, an immigrant neighborhood in the heart of Spain's capital. "The history surrounding the dictatorship has long been buried, but it still has a way of creeping up to the surface."