<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - Laia Malo]]> 10 <![CDATA[Triptych landed (III): … and the beautiful complexity of living]]> A pair of well-worn wings, displayed (ready to fly when needed or desired), on a shelf in the studio that Joan Miró built in Mont-roig del Camp, after falling in love with the landscape at eighteen. The photograph, exhibited at the Fundació Miró in Palma, is by Jean Marie del Moral: in black and white, it portrays the atrophied – but possible – limbs, with all the grays we never speak of. To cut off the wings, to mow the grass underfoot, to close all paths. The tongue warns against systematic evil and the artist rebels against it: bravely, he mutilates himself to coexist with the other mutilated, while carefully preserving ancestral limbs to roam freely through his work.

]]> <![CDATA[Triptych landed (II): The roses]]>

Keeping your feet on the ground is terrifying. It's scary because reality is a present with over forty wars, on a planet where 1% of humans accumulate almost half of the economic wealth, and in a country where only 1% of the population reads poetry. Nevertheless, gravity compels us to do so. Hopping on tiptoes or on one foot, with one leg in the air, and pretending it's all by chance or the will of gods we don't believe in, we can achieve the illusion of flight. It is in contact with the Earth's crust, where 40% of insect species are already endangered, that we will find a kind of immaterial and intangible reward: grounded and connected, we will feel part of something that has the possibility of moving.

]]> <![CDATA[Triptych landed (I): With spines]]> When I met Jaume Reus, I had deeply engraved in my third eye the intense expression of a little boy of nine or ten years old at the Viu l'Estiu camps, who refused to go to bed at Victory shouting: "I want to live! I don't want to sleep!". I wouldn't be surprised if I've already told you: he really passed on the premise to us; even to me, who has always enjoyed lazing around with a good book all morning, but counting, amidst insomnia, the hours that the body (with its essential demands) deducts from my anecdotal passage through the earth. I ponder it and the poet Jaume C. Pons Alorda appears to me, eyes wide open and ears perked to all the canteranos of all the writers in the universe, who admires and listens to "the paper moth, / the weevil of existence", while ecstatically squeaking that "the party is the suicide of the flesh, and satisfaction / is the Deicide / perpetual / of the forest / and of misery" (El corc. Labreu, 2025). I hear his keyboard echoing –euphoric, naturally self-destructive.

]]> <![CDATA[This is my thought]]> IF A HUNDRED GIRLS ARE MURDERED, I DON'T CARE WHO MURDERED THEM, WHERE THEY MURDERED THEM, OR WHY THEY MURDERED THEM. OR PERHAPS NOTHING MATTERS, BECAUSE WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE IS TO STOP IT. I HAVE TO STOP THE SPECIFIC PEOPLE WHO DECIDED OR PROVOKED THIS MURDER, AND EQUALLY THE STRUCTURES AND THE SPECIFIC PEOPLE WHO MINIMIZE THE MURDER OF A HUNDRED GIRLS, WHEREVER IT HAPPENS AND BY WHOMEVER IT IS, OR BY ONE. BECAUSE MORE THAN A HUNDRED GIRLS IS MORE THAN TERRIFIC, AND NOT BEING ABLE TO EVEN WRITE DOWN HOW MANY EXACTLY BECAUSE THEY DON'T SAY IT, AND BECAUSE IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO SERVE, TO TRULY GRASP IT, IS IGNOMINATING. It's terrible to think about the murder of even one girl, but more than a hundred girls have been murdered, massacred, at the Minab primary school in southern Iran, and no traditionally serious European media outlet wants to confirm that someone has killed between 150 and 180 girls. I don't know if, in terms of words and by saying aloud that someone has murdered a hundred children and their teachers, perhaps other readers will be distressed by not knowing who murdered them, but the fact is that no traditionally serious European media outlet wants to confirm which government did it, which political or military leader ordered the massacre. Some supposedly independent and newer digital media outlets are reporting that an attack by the United States and Israel has taken the lives of 180 civilians, mostly minors. But I don't care who they are; the point is that on February 28, 2026, someone launched an attack, likely guided by a missile, against a target—a school in a town that could be my town or yours. They were victims of bombs detonated by something non-human. We don't even know what the teachers were teaching or what the murdered girls were playing when the inhuman pseudo-leaders of puppet governments, fascinated by guided missiles, acted without sufficient precision to know for certain that they would only massacre and destroy "strategic targets," infrastructure, or human soldiers—puppets of capitalist fascism or any other religion—or irremediably lost and broken, without free will. Because even though the United Nations demands investigations and inquiries, and then offers not a word or a word of encouragement beyond denouncing it, but before whom? Before whom can we say that? Enough inhumanity, and to say enough to those who have allowed it to still be possible to murder a single girl, and more than a hundred girls and teachers, I only have in my hands actions as small and insignificant as shouting not to do things, not to write it, not to buy. I cautiously thank the president of the country where they say I live for the reactions, that he did not allow the installation of the US arsenal next to our airport, that he did not allow the use of the Madrid bases in Donald Trump, thank him for saying loudly that we will not go to any war and encourage him to make it true, that the measures he takes are done however they can, however they can, however they can, however they can, however they can, however they can. That this has happened so much, I don't know who did it, and what do I do? I read the poetry of an exiled woman, persecuted during a distant war, suicidal; the diary of another persecuted person, imprisoned and shot during a war closer to home; I watch the documentary of a survivor of another war in another place, and the suspicion is fleeting, almost a pleading wish, that it's false, that it's just images from an AI, disinformation; that the mothers who wail and win, spiritually murdered, are pixels and quite enough; that the graves dug in perfect square montage; that the girls and teachers are very much alive in the school in Minab, studying or playing; that nobody has murdered them and that it's the rulers of one country and another and the one beyond who invent it to build a Leizism of fear, and contaminate us, because the pigs rush forward and call for war and... They disregard humanity and life, but it is absolutely impossible that a primary school was bombed in 2026, although perhaps due to a misconception of how to believe, I don't want to believe it, if I do believe it, so what?

]]> <![CDATA[Mystical Readings (and III): We, who still believe]]> After all these days of buying, wrapping, unwrapping, and rearranging or repurposing the objects we call "gifts," it seems more than logical to consider what these lifeless piles of things are and what their purpose is—the things we covet, adopt, and shelter, or discard without a second thought. Once upon a time, any object could hold magic, was susceptible to an alchemy like the one Damià Rotger explores in his poems: the polished shard of broken mirror, a fan, or a pick and shovel offer companionship not in an everyday way, but in a revelatory one. However, today, our society, compulsively accumulating and simultaneously obsessively seeking novelty, generally lives surrounded by artificial materials and mass-produced items; or, in a minority, is enveloped in precious minerals extracted ignobly and wrapped in luxury pieces that exude the misery of their artisans.

]]> <![CDATA[Mystical Readings (II): The Primordial Animal Spirit]]> We cross, on the back of words, our sea-cemetery and an ocean with plastic banks, to the American continent, where the Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio says mass. On one of her usual walks of observation through the countryside, a god in the form of a deer announces to her that her only destiny is to write poems. In the essay Mystics (WunderKammer, 2025), Begoña Méndez writes that "God, like music, is something that is not understood and only felt." Non-human nature has always spoken to us; when we listened to it, we interpreted it as a divinity, or a previous existence of the soul. Méndez recounts the stories of poets and thinkers who accepted this call, and describes feminine mysticism as "a heretical and dissident practice that restored the sacred dimension to the flesh." The body, the object that contains us, whose physical element we struggle to separate ourselves from when transcending space-time, takes on the function of a medium between life on Earth and the afterlife.

]]> <![CDATA[Mystical Readings (I): 'Take up your cross']]> I was delighted by the script about the Mallorcan mystics (Leonard Muntaner, Ed.), ever since the writer and researcher Rosa Planas had explained to me that she worked there. I didn't expect to find the idols of a new faith: rather, I wanted to confirm the presumption that convent life had been, for many years, not only a cruel punishment from parents, husbands, et al. but also a dual and more universal, less anthropocentric and more magical alternative—life for Art.

]]> <![CDATA[Life of an artist]]> I waltzed through meticulously landscaped and manicured gardens, which I knew because someone had drawn on the score of Johann Strauss II that the piano teacher had taught me to play for a regional competition for young performers. I smelled the perfume of more than two hundred species of roses at once, and I marveled at the buzzing of bees and the whirring of hoverflies, and how the score ofThe Blue Danube I had captured that rhythm; until I had to take the guidebook out of my backpack and investigate where such a fabulous amount of pollinating fauna came from.

]]> <![CDATA[Generative paradoxes]]> This summer of wars against civilian populations and comedy of rulers, against whom we have come to believe we can only act virtually or in the street on a designated day, at times I have felt like Stefan Zweig: not so overwhelmed by his world of yesterday –with the fall of an empire, two world wars, exile, and censorship–, like a tantrum for ours, that of my generation. For adolescence dedicated to struggles we must continue to grapple with; for youth confused by globalization and frightened by economic crises and imminent climate change; for the pandemic and neo-fascisms, and the use of virtuality and artificial intelligence; and for the mature realization that we have submitted to and are working for a system that not only hasn't seemed fair and humane to us from the start, but that exploits us under the guise of guaranteeing rights (decent housing, public healthcare, retirement, Imserso trips) that we will no longer have access to in the future, even if we want them.

]]> <![CDATA[Signs of life]]> There was a time when we scratched our arms with a firecracker to carve an initial, so that when the toasted scab fell off, the memory of falling in love would remain; when we rejoiced in getting a little burned at Patum or the correfoc (fire run) during the festivities, a sign that we had played with fire; a time when the anecdote of a lost tooth or the stigma of a vaccine or illness gave character to the body and color to speech; when we wore lucky t-shirts and bracelets, frayed to be woven with history; and even at home, there was a time when stains, cracks, and junk represented experience, meaning. Today, what we have are advertisements that assure us that "life doesn't need to leave a mark": that we can and should try to avoid the traceable memory, the meaning, of our actions.

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