Miguel Martín (Toledo, 68 years old) has worked all his life as an upholsterer, but his dream was always to be an artist.
"If they had let me study Fine Arts when I was little, today I would be a painter and sculptor," he says.
To get rid of that thorn, now that he is retired he has set up a workshop in his home where he also unleashes his imagination that builds replicas of his favorite works, which has turned his garden into a peculiar museum in which two attract attention. large pieces: a four meter high Egyptian pyramid and a reproduction
of Picasso's
Guernica
carved into a low wall.
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Playwright Jorge Aznar Canet unexpectedly ran into that great pyramid when he visited Martín earlier this year. But he did not go home attracted by his artistic side, of which in fact he was not aware until that moment, but because during the last two decades Martín was the spokesperson for the Cañada Real de Madrid neighborhood association, known for being the largest irregular settlement in Spain and the object of continuous social controversy, such as the one that was unleashed this winter because the company that supplies it with electricity interrupted the service (which persists in some areas) due to alleged illegal hookups. The National Dramatic Center had commissioned the playwright to create a play based on real people who lived there and thought that this man could be a good source of inspiration.“My initial idea was to write about the neighborhood struggle for the legalization of the neighborhood, but when I entered that garden I was stunned. I realized that I did not know anything about what was happening here or about the rich life behind what we read in the press. And I decided that I had to write about it ”, recalls Aznar Canet.
This is how Miguel Martín and his works of art became the protagonists of one of the five scenes that make up the work
Dramawalker Cañada Real
,
written by five playwrights (Alberto Conejero, María Velasco, Roberto Martín, Cristina Rojas and the aforementioned Aznar Canet) who have visited the neighborhood in recent months to see first-hand who really lives there and what their daily life is like, beyond its image stigmatized as a shanty town or drug sales area. It is a production of the National Dramatic Center (CDN) that also has the particularity that it is not conceived to be represented in a theater, but to be recorded in sound format. “Spectators will be able to listen to it from their homes through our website, but we invite them to do so by walking through the places where the five stories take place. Let's say it's the
scenery
ideal for the ultimate objective of this project to be fulfilled: not only to encourage the authors to write about the neighborhood, but also for the public to know the reality of the Cañada above the official story ”, explains Fernando Sánchez-Cabezudo, artistic coordinator of the CDN, which already carried out a similar experience privately in 2014 in the Usera neighborhood of Madrid.
Germán Cuesta poses in front of his house, one of the first to be built in the Cañada Real.DAVID EXPOSITO
Performed by 14 actors, including Carmen Machi, Carolina Yuste, Pepe Viyuela, Francesco Carril and Elena González, the five scenes have been recorded
on site
and as of June 27, viewers will be able to download an application on the CDN website. listen to them, along with a map showing the points where they happen. “It is a series of fictions, that must be made clear, but they are all based on real lives and the set offers a fairly broad vision of what the neighborhood is. We have been working with associations in the area and neighbors for months to get to its essence ”, clarifies the artistic director of the project, Raquel Alarcón.
Last Sunday the last one was registered in the neighborhood's socio-community center, which was where the playwright Roberto Martín met the young people who inspired her.
“It is carried out by two girls who argue because one of them is going to live outside of La Cañada, but beyond that I wanted the work to reflect an important thing that I discovered in my conversations with the boys: their concern that they do not know It will identify them in the work, since the fact of living in the Cañada supposes a permanent conflict for them.
Sometimes they defend him to the death and other times they hide it because that stigmatizes them, ”Martín said on Sunday during a break from the recording.
Miguel Martín, in front of the Egyptian pyramid that he has built in the garden of his house in the Cañada Real.David Exposito
The socio-community center, where integration activities of all kinds are carried out, is located in sector five of La Cañada, where some of the oldest houses in the neighborhood were built in the seventies. One of them is that of Germán Cuesta, an 80-year-old from Extremadura, who personally tells his story in another of the
Dramawalker
scenes
,
as an interview dramatized by Alberto Conejero. His story could be that of any average Spaniard of his age, more than what is expected to be heard from an inhabitant of a shanty town. “When I was young, I came to work from Extremadura to Madrid and settled in the Vallecas neighborhood. I built this house with my own hands to come with my family on weekends and in the nineties I decided to move in directly. So we were here beautifully. We all knew each other, we helped each other, we were like a people. What happens is that they have never allowed us to legalize our houses and that caused other people to enter, drugs, problems ... Now I am going to live in a residence.
“Well, of course we were divine!”, Corroborates Martín, who also built his house in the seventies.
First also only for the weekends, until in the nineties he decided to make it his habitual home.
“And I'm not going to leave here.
It's enough that they want to kick you out, so I don't want to go.
They wanted to expel us with demolitions, with power cuts, saying atrocities about us ... but we resisted.
Of course there are some problem areas, but that would not have happened if they had allowed us to legalize our houses.
We don't just want the power back, we want to be legal! ”.
The actors Francesco Carril, Hajar Brown and Somaya Taoufiki, during the recording of the scene of 'Dramawalker Cañada Real' written by Roberto Martín, last Sunday in the socio-community center of the neighborhood. David Exposito
The other two scenes that make up
Dramawalker
are inspired by women. That of María Velasco, thought to be heard in front of a light pole in La Cañada, is carried out by a Moroccan mother and her daughter affected by the power cut in the middle of winter. And Cristina Rojas relied on hers on a group of neighborhood painters who showed their works in an exhibition recently organized by the socio-community center, which left the playwright very surprised: Not only because of the beauty of the pieces, but also because of the personality of the artists. "I never thought there would be so much light in this place!"
In addition to the Cañada Real, the
CDN's
Dramawalker
project
is being developed in the Poblenou neighborhoods of Barcelona and Vite de Santiago de Compostela, coordinated respectively by the Beckett room in the Catalan capital and by the Galician company Chévere, winner of the National Award for Theater in 2014. La de Vite can be heard from June 13 and Poblenou from July 14.
The playwrights Manuel Cortés, Paula Carballeira, Carlos Santiago, Esther Carrodeguas and Xron, under the artistic direction of the latter, have been in charge of entering Vite, a neighborhood populated mainly by people with limited resources, the majority rehoused in protective flats. official after being expelled from the most touristic areas of Santiago de Compostela.
In the eighties it was one of the black spots for heroin in Galicia, but neighborhood organizations struggled to get their young people out of the margins and in the nineties they invented a cry of self-determination to claim their identity in front of the city center:
¡¡ Vite Nazón!
(¡Vite Nation!).
In Barcelona, the creators Roc Esquius, Sílvia Navarro, Oriol Puig, Mercè Sarrias and Joan Yago
They have investigated the memory of Poblenou to reconstruct its history: from its past as an area with the highest industrial concentration in Catalonia to its conversion into a multicultural avant-garde neighborhood and the struggle of the residents to avoid its gentrification.