Raval Solidarity Project

Following the main collaborative event of the year, Maranya Festival, many of the participants connected with one another and began to create events, parties and workshops inspired by our immersive weekend. A weekend filled with music and dancing, fuelled by locally sourced, organic and vegetarian food. It featured permaculture, poetry and grow your own food workshops, yoga, aerial hoop, contemporary dance, medicinal plants, macrame, and Wim Hof breathing with cold water exposure.

It was a celebration which rippled through the community and kept spirits high in an otherwise strange and sometimes tense year. The community has such an eclectic collection of people with beautifully diverse personalities, interests and skills and it was a blessing to see how things organically continued to happen after this weekend.

Throughout this project we were in collaboration with Chanti, the founder of Culture Creativa who was onboarded as our mentor. Chanti uses her Instagram and website to connect local, migrant artists and create booming events which encourage artists, poets and speakers to take to the mic and share their message. As a performer she uses her powerful lyrics to unite and move the crowd and to inspire action in their own lives and communities. She worked with our team as they were networking and attending events to get inspired about how they could initiate social change, through workshops and events to build community and strengthen the bonds between diverse groups of people.

Back in the heart of Raval we got together to discuss how we could tackle something as large as the fashion industry. While the figures are obvious, it seems that many people are unable or unwilling to boycott high street brands in the name of our planet and future generations. Why is that? Many reasons including constant advertising, social pressure, lack of funds or time often lead people to seek fashionable or cheap clothing from conveniently located, fast fashion brands. 

Latvian designer and Barcelona resident Madara Sabanova is a talented designer and tailor with her own brand @madara_couture_ which values high quality, locally sourced materials and timeless, often one-off pieces which adhere to the label “Slow Fashion”.

We realised that so many of us were aware of the issues of fast fashion, often gathering for clothes swaps amongst friends, borrowing or buying second hand. But so many of us were not really considering repairing or altering the clothes that we already owned. In order to inspire and encourage us to experiment with the things we already have, Madara organised a workshop which invited us to bring an item of clothing to ‘sacrifice’ and experiment with upcycling or fixing our clothes. 

This brought a small group of eager people together, all with complaints about clothing companies ill fitting items and decreasing quality of clothes. It was a fun and experimental afternoon which was filled with great conversations and ideas about how we can reuse, repair and restyle our items and create more interesting, creatively expressive and well-fitting clothes.

Another project which bloomed into action was the creation of a weekend retreat in nature at the beginning of Autumn called Into The Darkness, the team and participants from Maranya Festival began to meet regularly to organise this healing and restorative event for the community. Expanding on some of the workshops which were shared during the festival and designing a menu which was seasonal and local, they secured the location in the Pyrenees at Sanilles Eco Retreat and hosted a small event for members of the community. The team was very thorough in the planning of the event and plan to re-run the event again in the Spring as we move Into the Light again.

Chanti lead the team in the development of Mami Munch, a social project which brings people together through sharing of fusion and traditional food from our mixed backgrounds. Another simple, accessible and love-infused idea. Designed to celebrate women from different cultures and countries, already cooking for their families or communities and bringing them together to connect through this shared experience, this project will continue in 2022