Shouting

"the mural is not touched",

several hundred residents of the Madrid neighborhood of La Concepción have gathered this Sunday to show their rejection of a Vox proposal for which a mural with the faces of women like Frida Khalo goes to be replaced by another with Paralympic athletes.

Along a little more than 50 meters, on one of the walls of the Concepción sports center, with purple predominant and mixed with warm tones,

the faces of 15 historical women

follow one another

: Comanda Ramona, Rosa Parks, Gata Cattana, Nina Simone, Liudmila Pavlichenko, Emma Stone (in the role of former tennis player Billie Jean King), Kanno Sugako, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Valentina Tereshkova, Angela Davis, Rosa Arauzo, Lucía Sánchez Sorni and Rigoberta Menchú.

A heterogeneous group of women that

the Vox group asked to "change"

in the plenary session of the Lineal City Board to instead execute another mural dedicated to athletes and sports that

"does not contain any political message, only sports."

Vox presented an amendment to the proposal - which went ahead with the votes of PP and Citizens - to specify that the painting, on that wall since 2018, should be dedicated to Paralympic athletes, before which the orange party presented another transactional amendment to add that five sports men and five women should be represented.

Four days after that vote, politicians from the PSOE, United We Can and More Madrid, neighbors, neighborhood associations, AMPAS, people of all ages have taken José del Hierro street shouting "the mural is not touched", while in Change.org nearly 40,000 people have signed up to "not allow the destruction of women and their history."

"If they want to remove it, they will remove it, because they have all the means, including the police, but of course they are going to have us in front of them and we are going to defend it tooth and nail. What belongs to the neighborhood in the neighborhood stays" says Aida, from the Quintana neighborhood association.

A neighborhood that

participated in the execution and conception of this mural and

that, like Julia, who has come with her children, Julia and Hugo, is used to seeing it almost daily.

Almost every day they pass in front of this painting because they go a lot to the nearby park.

"Julia doesn't say much, but Hugo calls it the mural of powerful women," she says.

She adds that "spending money, removing art, when there are thousands of walls, and when something that is part of history is being claimed" is something that for her "does not make much sense."

Like all the people consulted by Efe, and as claimed in the manifesto, Julia sees it as "wonderful" that a mural is made about Paralympic athletes.

"But what concerns me with morality is that they want to remove this one, and I think there is a very ideological point (...).

It seems a bit stupid to break art to build art, we are here to unite and not to remove".

"This mural has been very well received in the neighborhood. Until now, that Vox has made this proposal, it has been a feminist symbol of the unity of the neighborhood. There has never been a protest, a problem, with the mural. To everyone He liked it, people I know, neighbors, they had taken a photo for the WhatsApp profile with some figure on the mural. People received it very well, "says Maite, who is part of a cultural association in the neighborhood.

The initial idea of ​​'The union makes strength' part of the Equality Table of the Local Forum of Ciudad Lineal, explains to Efe Jorge Nuño, of the Unlogic Crew collective that devised and executed the mural, "participatory both in its conception and in its execution".

"We made two sketches that were uploaded to the Decide Madrid website and the citizens voted the one they wanted. The idea that the district transmitted to us from the first moment when we had the neighborhood meetings is that they wanted

a wall that represented equality, they wanted to give visibility of the role of women in history ",

abounds Nuño.

Nor are they "satisfied" with some of the arguments they have heard these days justifying the removal of the mural.

"The criteria by which these women are on this wall are in no way political. We don't even know, in many cases, what their political ideas were, and we don't care about them. These women are here because each of their spheres fought for a real equality, and what we want is to make their struggle and their work visible ", he adds.

Nuño emphasizes that "it is always much easier to erase than to create", but points out that "with the support we are receiving, we hope that erasing will not be so easy."

The mayor of Madrid and national spokesman for the PP,

José Luis Martínez-Almeida,

said this Sunday that it was "so democratic" to decide to put it as now to remove it.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • Vox

  • PP

  • Madrid

  • United we can

  • PSOE

  • More Madrid

  • Citizens

Reactions Pablo Casado charges against Vox for supporting Trump and "justifying that he encouraged the taking of the Capitol"

Post-pandemic botanical analysis, is the enemy at home?

One-year government exam (8) The opposition parties: more divided, from 'sorpasso' to absorption

See links of interest

  • 2021 calendar

  • Madrid work calendar

  • Malaga - Ponferradina

  • Fiorentina - Crotone

  • Alavés - Real Madrid, live

  • Elche - Barcelona, ​​live

  • Atlético de Madrid - Valencia, live