Inhaltsverzeichnis für November 2019 in Womankind

Editor-in-Chief, Womankind magazine “Wanderer,” once wrote Spanish poet Antonio Machado, “your footsteps are the road, and nothing more.” Machado, one of Spain’s most celebrated poets, was perhaps implying that our life unravels before us, minute by minute, a form of destiny in motion. “Wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking.” It’s an interesting way of viewing identity, since most of us tend to think of ourselves - the person we are today - as being quite distinct from the person we might become, as though the two will meet at some distant point in time, but certainly not now. Machado instead seems to suggest that the two are one and the same, or at least share the moment together. “By walking one makes the road, and…

Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira, born in Madrid in 1914, was conceived as a child prodigy, painstakingly educated by her ambitious mother to be one of the great intellectuals of the time. By age three, she was already writing, and by eight she spoke six languages, finishing law school by 17. But a year later Hildegart was found murdered in her bed, shot three times in the head and one in the heart. In the history books, Hildegart is remembered for being an activist for sex reform in Spain, and for her close correspondence with other major intellectuals including Havelock Ellis, Margaret Sanger, and H.G. Wells. Before 16, she’d written books and pamphlets on sexual reform, and was chosen to head up an international conference in Spain. But Hildegart’s contribution to the…

When we go inside the Sagrada Família, I remain silent for a few minutes to make people feel the space. Sun shines through the stained-glass windows and the tourists are overwhelmed. Sometimes when I’m guiding tourists from many different countries it can become chaotic. And, to be completely honest, big crowds are chaotic for Barcelona. Barcelona has become a social media city of late. I was born into a Catalan family and raised in a town 30 minutes from Barcelona. My parents met in a bookshop and later got married. I am the youngest of three girls. Childhood was the most beautiful stage of my life because in adolescence, it then got complicated. I was a bigger girl, and I was not good at sport. I felt weird in high…

Maruja Mallo was a writer of lists, such as the names and phone numbers of influential friends like Pablo Neruda, but also lists full of phrases about herself. “Energy, equilibrium, talent,” is scrawled in her phone book from Buenos Aires; “very pronounced Apollo”, “great artistic and organising talent”, “efficient success all over the world (correcting the defects like talking without thinking, treading on shaky ground)”. It’s true that Mallo was often as wild in speech as she was in dress and was chastised for both in the press. Cloaked in her de rigueur fur coat, her face at times as heavily painted as her paintings, the press spent as much time describing her unconventional behaviour, like riding a bike into church during mass, and her outrageous remarks, as they did…

During her first yeas in Goizueta, a town of 700 in the mountains of Navarra, Spain, Maite Sánchez felt that she was being watched. She had come to the town with her three small children and the conviction that she could really do it: she could make her living from the land. It was a life she’d dreamt of living ever since she was a child growing up near San Sebastián, on the Basque coast, where her father was a nationalist revolutionary and her mother a radical feminist, where the family lived “between many political stories” at a time in the ’70s and ’80s, when the region experienced brutal domestic terrorism. She remembered loving animals and finding in them an escape from the violence of everyday life - shootings and…

“A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.”— Gloria Steinem Are you someone who struggles to make major life decisions for fear of acting too impulsively, of making the wrong choice, of not having all the information on hand, fearful that you’ll forever kick yourself for the decision you’ve just made? If you’re someone who’s easily paralysed by indecision, then this little rule of thumb may pull you out of the muddy path you often find yourself in. Attributed to former US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, the rule says that you can relax and make a choice when you have between 40 and 70 per cent of the information. “Get as much information as you can and then you pay attention to your intuition, to…

In her series titled The Unknown, Spanish fine art photographer Andrea Torres Balaguer introduces us to a series of women whose faces are masked by a dash of colour. The viewer is left with a pose, a stance, and the vivid colours of the clothing, but without a face we can’t complete the picture. Do we see a series of women before us? Or is it a single woman posing in different ways? “No one reveals herself as she is,” German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said. “We all wear a mask and play a role.”…

Black, fuchsia, turquoise, white satin, wool, frills, and bows. Here stands a woman styled like Picasso, but with a British touch, a French flair, with some Asian and African influences thrown in for effect. This fashion recipe of colour mixed with artisan quality has been working for Spanish designer Lydia Delgado since the early 1990s, a time when her line was forever paraded up and down the runways, Salon Gaudí in Barcelona, and Pasarela Cibeles in Madrid. Today, Lydia chooses to showcase her collections in a different way - mostly on social media and the internet, and during this transformation from runway to the virtual realm, she’s uncovered a new and deeper channel for expressing her creative universe, on canvas. How did you get into fashion? I never thought I’d…

The older we get, the more our personalities tend to become set in stone. It’s not that we lose our capacity for change. Rather, with increasing age, we usually live increasingly routinised lives - the grooves of daily habit become deeper, our repertoires of experience narrower. As a general rule (though there are exceptions), we increasingly mix with the same people, visit the same places, perform the same tasks at work and at home. The world asks increasingly repetitive questions of us and we in turn come back with the same answers. Making the decision to relocate to another country therefore offers a tantalising prospect: the chance to shake the ‘snow globe’ of your life and see where the pieces land. The new customs, language, landscape, and people will almost inevitably…

Once I was dancing in a tablao, I started crying and crying and crying. When I dance, I express pain, joy, sadness, or happiness - right there on the stage. My father was in the audience, and I was overcome with emotions like sadness. I was born in Barcelona. My father, Pedro, was a draughtsman, and my mother, Isabel, worked for an insurance company. I have a brother, Hector, who is four years older than me. My brother is now a director of one of the biggest hotels in Barcelona. My parents divorced when I was 14. My father ruled the house. Behind his back, my mother would pay for my dance lessons. My brother always sided with my father. Even when I was 25 and dancing professionally, they tried…

As I stared at the image of Doña Ana de Mendoza, the Princess of Éboli - known as the “princess with the eye patch” - my eyes began to smart. A daughter of the all-powerful House of Mendoza, a family of nobles who served the Spanish realm as knights, interpreters of the law and administrators for the monarchy, Ana (1540-1592) might have become a minor supporting player in Spanish history, but due to her aristocratic origins, a judicious marriage, her beauty, intellect, and the mystery surrounding the eye patch she wore over her right eye from girlhood to her death, she became a leading figure in the court of King Philip II of Spain - the man who sent the armada across the English Channel in a bid to re-establish…

When did you decide to change your life’s path? The idea was born in a café in Belsize Park, London, in 2011. There, my husband and I decided to leave our jobs. I was working as an interior designer in Barcelona, while my husband Álvaro was working in London. We wanted to have an adventure, and to channel our creative energies towards making something we’d enjoy. So we started working on the project, Con Alma Design, in 2013. We left everything and moved to Mallorca. The main idea was to recover something old and give it new life, so we started restoring old furniture - but we soon realised that this was not what we were looking for. So, from our workshop in the countryside, we decided to give new…

“No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.” Mary Wortley Montagu Nada By Carmen Laforet Nada, a novel, set in post Spanish Civil War Barcelona is the first novel of Spanish author Carmen Laforet, published in 1945. Nada, which means “nothing” in Spanish, is narrated by its main character, Andrea, an orphan, raised in a convent in provincial Spain. Nursing fond memories of her well-off family in Barcelona, Andrea travels to Barcelona to her grandmother’s home, which to her dismay is filthy and falling apart, where she discovers a band of misfit relatives. In Diamond Square By Mercè Rodoreda First published in 1962, In Diamond Square, also published in English as The Time of the Doves, is considered one of the most important Catalan novels of…

It’s the one question we’d all like to know the answer to, so we could just get on with it - the living part, that is. If we knew what the ‘good life’ entailed then we could shun the rest, and just concentrate on the important bits. But society has a tendency to derail us. We’re repeatedly told that the good life is about making loads of money, having a successful career, and buying as much as we can possibly shovel into our houses and garages. Some are convinced that they need to be famous and get their name up in lights for the good life to kick in. It’s worth remembering that the phase of flight for the Kunanyia stephaniae butterfly lasts a mere 14 days, long enough for…

The mountain ascetic who shuns meat, television, alcohol, and doesn’t say a mean word about anyone, what willpower they must possess, we think. But what would you say to the suggestion that the mountain ascetic actually exercises no willpower at all? Rather, she has given herself no choice but to shun these things because it’s in her code of conduct, or mission statement. I shall not watch television. I shall not eat meat. I abstain from calling my neighbour a good-for-nothing donkey because it’s how I behave. Schools, universities, sporting teams, the military, all have codes of conduct for the same reason, to save people from the galactic struggle of having to exercise willpower or to do the ‘expected thing’. Thou shall not have a messy bed in the military,…

Warm afternoon sun, a glass of red wine and music from a distant guitar. I took this moment to stop and take a bite of a plump, green olive. I was here. I’d done it. I’d left my old world behind and started a new life in Spain. Don’t we all have moments in life when we want to just walk away from it all? Start over, someplace a little warmer, a little wilder. Away from ringing phones, clogged inboxes and constant calendar updates? I certainly did. I never really knew what I wanted to do in life. Like many people, I drifted into working a job in the city that I didn’t like but didn’t know how to do without. Mine was retail sales - Ladies High Fashion, to…

Some people are born more sensitive and intense than others. Perhaps you have been told all your life that you are ‘too much’, ‘too sensitive’, ‘too overbearing’, ‘too dramatic’, or ‘too emotional’. You feel things so strongly sometimes it feels out of control. You feel sorrow deeply, but you are also deeply moved by beauty in the world, and you know rapture and ecstasy better than anyone. Perhaps in a social situation, you find yourself absorbing other people’s emotions and get overwhelmed. You ponder existential issues such as life’s meaning and death, though those around you do not always share your concerns. You may have physical sensitivities and struggle with loud noises, strong smells, rough textures. People call you a philosopher, an empath, a psychic, or just someone with thin…

I first came to Barcelona from Valencia on an internship to work at an art gallery for eight months. From then I realised that I didn’t want to pursue a career as an artist. I am not saying that all art galleries function the same way, but some are them are all about sales and less about the art. I don’t like this, viewing art as money. True, artists have to make money, but what sacrifices do you have to make to keep your clients happy? Before this job at the art gallery, I thought art exhibitions were this ‘unique’ experience. I was very naïve. There are artists who pay to have their work exhibited, and when you work at an art gallery, money seems to be all that matters.…

Catalan-born Txell Miras fuses her passion for art with fashion, seeing clothes as a three-dimensional sculpture crafted out of fabric. Txell’s beginnings were in fine art, studying at the University of Barcelona. She then moved across to fashion, first studying at the Llotja Arts School of Barcelona followed by a masters on scholarship at Milan’s Domus Academy where she met tutor Neil Barrett, whose label she worked on from 2003 until 2016. Txell has always remained true to her artistic vision, never succumbing to commercial pressure to slavishly follow trends or mass produce. Her clothes are artistic creations, much like her fashion shows, a means by which she can explore philosophical and literary ideas. What are your first memories of the fashion world? When I was a child I made…

Please tell us a little about your life in Spain? I live in Madrid, but I am from Jerez de la Frontera. I love to travel, and I love swimming in the Mediterranean. I holiday in two destinations - Cádiz and Ibiza. But Italy is a country that I visit a lot. It captivates me. When did you start your pottery design business? It started as a hobby. I always liked to paint, and someone suggested to me that I try to paint porcelain. So, I signed up for a class and just loved it. Shortly after I started a new job in charge of marketing and communication at a large hotel group, but after seven years there I decided to dedicate my life to doing what I loved, but…

In 2001, Edurne Pasaban, age 28, summited Mount Everest. She later went on to climb Makalu, Cho Oyu, Lhotse, Gasherbrum II, Gasherbrum I, K2, Nanga Parbat, Broad Peak, Dhaulagiri, Manaslu and Annapurna, and Shishapangma, becoming the first woman in the world to climb all 14 mountains above 8,000 metres. During her journey to the top, she lost 14 close friends. What’s the most thrilling climb you’ve ever done? Let’s say that my life has two chapters: one before K2 and one after. K2 is a very dangerous mountain. It is shaped like a pyramid. No woman before me had ever climbed it and returned alive. It was extremely difficult to summit it at first try, but we did it. I had a strong team. It was a life-changing experience. From…