A monument for a livable life
Eugenio Merino +Avelino Sala
@ NoMade Biennial in Elblag, Poland.
Text by Semiramis Gonzalez
“Without community there is no liberation
Audre Lorde
When you type “LGTBI collective Poland” into Google, the second result is a news item on the RTVE website entitled “The country with the fewest LGBTI rights in the European Union”. It is followed by one from El Periódico “Poland and Hungary, at the bottom of LGTBI rights in Europe”. The headlines are shocking, but the data is even more so: more than 100 cities and towns in the country declared themselves free of “LGBT ideology”. As the article in RTVE reports, ILGA-Europe, the European branch of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, ranks Poland as the last country in the European Union in terms of LGBTI rights. Facts and figures are, above all, lives; daily routines of those who every day have to cross the streets, go to work, shop, walk… knowing that 57% of Polish society is against LGTBI people publicly showing their lifestyle, 56% is against equal marriage and 75% is against adoption (figures from 2021).
A couple of years ago the European Commission opened an infringement procedure against Poland for its “LGTBI-free zones”, as they are contrary to the fundamental values of the Union, and at the beginning of 2023 the Court of Justice of the European Union declared illegal the Polish law that allows the denial of a contract to a worker because of his or her sexual orientation. But there is little more we can say that the 27 have done to stop a direct attack on the fundamental rights of a group. Poland’s ultra-conservative drift is also directed at half of its population, at women, whom it censures, prohibits from deciding on the voluntary interruption of pregnancy or directly insults for defending their rights.
This is the reality in which, every year, hundreds of people take to the streets to demand justice and a livable life for the LGTBI community. Many people decide to go into exile, but also many others, increasingly younger, decide to respond to the rise of the ultraconservatives. In this context, the Spanish artists Eugenio Merino and Avelino Sala have presented the Monument to the Resistance of Diversity at the biennial NoMade, Art Center Gallery EL, Elblag, in collaboration with the Polish Pride Alliance and with the help of the spokesperson of the Polish Equality Foundation, Julia Maciocha. A piece that brings together banners and flags used in recent demonstrations held in different Polish cities to build with them a monument to dignity.
A monument is, by its very definition, “any work of sufficient value to the human group that erected it. It must be “public and visible” (as defined by Wikipedia). This monument created by Sala y Merino is, in itself, much more of a monument than many that occupy the streets of Poland. The meaning that sustains it is the value of justice and something as important as it is crucial, such as living a livable, kind life that allows us to exist without fear of being violated because of our sexual orientation or our gender expression. The piece is charged with beauty with the colours of the rainbow as a symbolic space of freedom and diversity. A global emblem that embraces all of us who are part of a collective whose visibility and existence continues to be a political issue. But this work by Sala and Merino is also an emotional monument, charged with the energies of those who have created each banner, each flag, those who have printed, defended and held them in a public space, in a demonstration, demanding a space of freedom for the collective. It is a monument charged with pain and activism, with violence and resistance, with pain and visibility, because beyond the art object, here the piece is alive from before, it is charged with all the political sense of defending the LGTBI collective, and now arrives in the space of art to reclaim its visibility, its resistance and its right to exist.
“I feel and accept myself”, “March for equality”, “Let’s send love” or “We want rights” are some of the slogans we read on this living monument, charged with the tears and resistance of those who ask for something as basic as being able to exist in equality.
Inés Martín Rodrigo says in her book “Una homosexualidad propia. Una reivindicación de la identidad lésbica a través de sus referentes culturales” that literature has served as a refuge for the LGTBI collective, but “also as a beacon illuminating realities”. I believe that we find much of this in the Monument, which not only presents, but also signifies, that it is “public and patent”, capable of situating within the framework of a Biennial the claims of a collective that is no more than a group of people with names and surnames, with families, with routines… with fears. If the space of art is not the place to take refuge and make demands, if fiction is not something profoundly political, then what is left? Simple aesthetics? This monument is a tribute, but it is also a call to action, a rainbow of resistance in the face of political inoperativeness to defend LGTBI people. A monument that celebrates the resistance of diversity and invites us to unite, to cry out for our neighbours who, in the end, are only asking to be able to live and exist in freedom.
