What began as a clandestine club for reading and reciting poetry has today become one of Barcelona’s most important artistic communities. And I call it a community because “here, the meeting between artists goes beyond commercialising art: it creates a safe, social space for those for whom art is not merely fleeting but a way to express the human condition at its most genuine level,” as Aleta tells us, the founder of the project.
Znak Community is home to lost street artists from around the globe, who find in Aleta Aydarti — mother of poets (though she prefers other descriptions) and a contemporary researcher into the intersections of art — a space to explore subversive works. After all, there is nothing more anticapitalist than being a poet. And just as with poetry, Aleta has opened her community to jazz, opera, and other disciplines that nowadays lie outside the mainstream spotlight.
At their first event in La Culture House — one of Barcelona’s most revolutionary cultural centres — under the banner Art and Grief, all members of the collective gathered around an enormous blue table designed by Anna Belkina with appetisers served on small marble platters from Umami Collective, turning the culinary experience into an art form. Meanwhile, attendees introduced themselves and savored the melodic beats of Sp.ice, one of the standout voices in the UK Garage scene now thriving in Barcelona.
The evening started with a discussion on how artistic works shape our ways of grieving. Alessandra BB expanded her performance My Paper Sasha into an interactive experience of vulnerability through the body with the activity Paper Version. In it, guests were invited to externalise their feelings of grief by painting their emotions onto another’s body. Afterward, artists from the community’s three core disciplines — poetry, dance, and piano — took the stage.
The poetry presentation was a compendium of poems that intertwined sex and mourning. The poet began by apologising to himself before moving into Préñame, an unpublished piece in which he dismantled some of the most toxic dynamics ascribed to gay sex and ultimately recited verses about his own assault. It was so raw that it left the audience spellbound — and some with tears — for its honesty and courage: transforming something so painful into something profoundly beautiful.
The highlight of the night was the performance by Teatro Anstatuanto. The dance company of twin sisters Alena and Alina moved between classical, contemporary, and experimental styles, evoking both the duality and synchronicity of mourning’s two complementary faces of grief, especially when after crying arrives some kind of art. The evening closed with the French pianist Guillaume Coulbois, whose rendition of a dreamlike Portuguese jazz piece transported the audience to an unexplored universe, some reaching it through the music alone, others aided by the wine from ANYTIHYPE and the vermouth from Perucchi 1876, the event’s sponsors.
In its nearly four years of existence, Znak has remained true to its founding members while welcoming new voices because “what I value most is the diversity, the lack of prejudices — people come from everywhere, and each brings a different proposal,” says Emilia, one of the community’s veterans. Through this mixture of perspectives, Znak manages to challenge the hegemony of art and rewrite it with a solid project that exists before and after each event. Here, art endures, and, rather than being silenced, it finds its own voice.
