Mami Sugar. Search no. 3: Rewriting

A sock: an everyday object, minimal, almost insignificant. When I look at it, I make an immediate association:

sock → foot → shoe

And this journey leads me to think about hundreds, thousands of people who walk:

• who cross deserts, coasts, cities and frontiers;
• who reach Europe or try to get to Catalonia;
• who disappear from our view as soon as they get to the city;
• who cannot go into museums, but sustain everyday life.

I think of those who live on the edges, about non-normative bodies that do not fit into the official narrative. I think of those, still without papers, who build and sustain the Catalan economy:

• the people in the fields in Lleida province,
• those who work in recycling with the same materials that Tàpies used to create his work.

Those invisible presences who are here; their ancestors felt the whip that helped to raise up this country with raw materials like cocoa, coffee, sugar and timber.

And if I think of Tàpies, I inevitably think of Catalonia. And if I think of Catalonia, is see the senyera, its flag. How would a Catalan flag be constructed today?

What is its gold? Whose is the blood behind the four red bars?

But I am Catalan. This flag is also mine. We need to appropriate the symbols, transform them, play with them, create new narratives.

This is another foundational story for the 21st-century Catalan flag, made from the socks of Afro-descendent people who walk over fictitious blood.

This is why I propose a different senyera: a flag created from the sidelines, from the bodies that are not expected in the street but are exhibited in the museum as a symbol of diversity and integration.

In this other flag, the yellow is the gold of Abya Yala: the wealth extracted from Africa and Latin America, today turned into coltan, cocoa, oil and extractive companies that sustain European well-being. The red is the blood of the transatlantic trade: a trail that lives on in the deaths in the Mediterranean, on the frontiers where black bodies continue to bleed.

Because the black presence in Catalonia does not begin with recent migration: it is ancient, it is in the land and in time.

In almost all regions of Africa there exists a figure that connects the worlds of the living and the dead. A presence that dresses in clothing made of dried leaves, of fibres, of cloths, of materials that breathe memory. It is a mask that entertains children, that dances, that provokes, but that also guides, supports and helps to transcend. A figure that does not just appear: it intercedes. That does not just dance: it opens gateways. That does not just play: it protects.

I want to take this ancestral figure and create one of our own; a being wearing socks, with the socks of people who migrate to Catalonia, and also the socks used to create this new flag.

Socks get lost in the wash, yes; but they are also the best place to keep secrets, to protect small treasures, to keep us from the cold in the world. This is why I ask the migrant community for these odd socks in order to create a suit to dialogue face to face with Tàpies’ giant sock; a suit to stir a dance of the marginalised, a movement to bring together times and places, to connect me to the thousands of people who walk, who make the crossing over to Europe, to Spain, to Catalonia. Because when there are no shoes, when all has been lost or left behind, we will carry on walking in socks.

My body—black, female, nearly fifty years old, fat, queer, excessive—is not the expected body. But it is this body that today constructs this new senyera. That claims its place in the narrative. That says: Catalonia is also written by us. That declares: we are here, we have always been here and we are a fundamental part of what this territory is and what it may become.

Silvia Albert Sopale