The beauty of being Bear. What is being Bear? Very simple: being gay and not having the typical standards that the gay community also has in terms of physical beauty, image and attitude. And, of course, the LGBT community in general is one of the most open-minded ones and always willing to camble, both aesthetically, culturally and morally as well as in attitude and music. The Bears are already a wide community around the globe, and it’s important that the Bear community have a place to meet and exchange for all of those who are a bit heavier, have more hair on their body or maybe less hair on their head. Generally, the Bear profile is along these lines, as well as being very cheerful, smiling and happy to celebrate their bodies. You only have to have some attitude, no fear and celebrate the love for body and life.

And if we decided to adopt a position above the body and further than the aesthetics that culture bombards us with all the time, we’d have to be aware that the body should always be celebrated, in every single way. And this goes further than any hedonistic stance, since our body is our only luggage during the time that we’re given to live, and we should enjoy it always. The freedom that exists inside the LGBT community and the political importance that the configuration of the body has inside it, makes of the body a revolutionary weapon and an experimentation space for change inside the common bourgeois organization that we live in. Certainly, the body does not escape the capitalist mechanics, and we’re constantly bombarded with ways of how to carry our own body. Maybe we should maintain an alert position in front of all of this. The heterosexual community, somehow, is not aware of the mechanisms that exist behind the whole advertising, television, music and culture in which both the masculine and feminine genders are put up as standards of Western and Oriental culture. However, the body and sexuality are above all of these limits.

If you’re Bear or sympathise with them or you like these beautiful and heavy hairy men, don’t miss out on going to GuadalkiBear Seville 2011. It will be an international meeting where you’ll be able to enjoy the company of other Bears like you and get to meet people with great vibe. Among the events prepared for this Bear festival there’ll be walks in the beautiful city of Seville, as well as boat cruises, sessions in different gay-friendly bars as well as loud partying so you can dance and give everything you’ve got on the dancefloor. For more information visit the following webpage: http://www.guadalkibear.com/

Alexa Ray

Don’t miss out on getting apartments in Seville and be part of this Bear celebration. The Bear universe is for you, and even more in this beautiful city of Seville. A few mysteries and adventures await.

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Translated by: aleixgwilliam
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The tragic death of Andy Warhol by an unfortunate medical negligence- he, somehow was already dead, he who miraculously saved the life of Valerie Solanas in a brutal attack, two decades before (attack whose only positive side effect was perhaps to bring Billy Name to his legendary volunteer prison time in the darkroom, in which he took months and months locked up), he, who had managed to evade the date in which officially his days were due to end, to confirm his role of contemporary myth, just to  eventually end up in an aseptic room of a New York hospital away from any sense of threat almost at the worst time (although at these points, the best and worst moments, are only established, with perspective when everything is over and our existence is reduced to the amount of stories we want to count on) as Lennon, Marley, Harrison and even as Nico (What idiocy, to die falling off a bicycle in Ibiza after having gone through so much)

Like so many others that perhaps because they were too great the Moirae can not deal with anyone able to give them the death face to face, have to deal with this childish accident, carelessness, chance, a cowardly blow struck almost without wishing for any pusillanimous being often, as I said, almost at the worst time because it is bad time to die when we seem happy and even renewed, excited again with new challenges and projects, and work with so much life ahead, we’ve left behind gales and storms and managed to cross our Cape Horn and it does not seem like in any possible way, that the neglect of a racist or homophobic or simply tired, or depressed nurse, absent for any reason that day, ended out and finishing and clearing our steps in the world, this tragic death, I mentioned before, resulted in perhaps the only positive side effect of the matter, something had to rhyme with the departure of Billy Name, the darkroom, the meeting after many years without even talking, John Cale and Lou Reed to make Songs for Drella (1990), an exceptional tribute album. In one song, the extraordinary Trouble With classicist through Cale, we heard the voice of Warhol expressing his sincere admiration for the young junkies who use their spray to paint on trains and walls of the city center.

This fascination came, perhaps from both his unerring instinct for art, as well as his most classical wave (Warhol’s art education was impeccable), as in every city in the world, during thousands of years, it has been practiced in one way or another-and probably no other artistic activity and illustrate better reflects the heart, pulse and respiration of the city, the art of graffiti.

Paul Oilzum

The recent publication in Spain of the book ‘The essential names of street art and Spanish graffiti’ is a wonderful invitation to look at the urban drift, which is constantly reinventing the city. Dare to face the challenge, for example, by following the course of the Guadalquivir, when renting apartments in Seville

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Translated by: Hans
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On the 27th of October, the Andalusian Center of Contemporary Art in Seville opens its exhibition “Margen y Ciudad” from Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui. The artist has done some incredible work themed around cities and forgotten spaces, evoking the idea of loss of memory of those places which reside on the margins of the city’s collective consciousness as a result of being ruins.

Lara Almarcegui was born in Zaragoza in 1972. She studied Fine Art at the University of Cuenca, and later at the Art Department at the University of Lisbon. In the 1990s, she was invited by Werner Büttner to the Art Department at Hamburg, and later attended the School of Fine Art in Nantes in France, and also completed a post-grad at De Ateliers 63 in Amsterdam.

Her work in installation and intervention is known as Demolitions, Auto-constructions and Wastelands, and has led her to be a key figure in the studies of Urban Art, as she pays a special attention to the development of cities, and its treatment of its forgotten spaces. These are the spaces Almarcegui seeks out – those ruined, ignored areas of a city – in order to give them cultural visibility once again.

In her work Auto-construction Installation in Amsterdam, made in 2004, she focuses on auto-construction and recuperation, with a series of 26 photographs on 20x30cm, and texts of 10x15cm which are placed on tables. With these interventions, Almarcegui hopes to draw to the attention of the public, and the urban community, and encourage them to acknowledge these spaces, and how their abandonment has become a part of collective memory.

This project was carried out in the French city of Saint Nazaire, where she used different recuperated and salvaged parts from the city’s shipyards, bringing them to the attention of locals. Each individual part spoke of the context and the society which had been created by its inhabitants – but above all, it referred back to the moment in the past when these abandoned elements had been of use, and how different the city was then.

Her conceptual work is an intense pursuit of the idea of memorialization – of the engagement of a city’s inhabitants with its past, and the changing circumstances which have been forgotten through time; and of the different models of the construction of the city, whereby many places have been condemned to abandonment, such as the big factories which prevailed during the high era of industrial capitalism, occupying now disused spaces, along side the also empty old worker’s houses.

The territory used by Almarcegui is the city. It is there where she conducts her dissection – in those areas well off the beaten path of the tourist trail. What she is looking for are the derelict and abandoned places which have been reclaimed by inhabitants without the knowledge of its past identity, or what its function or use was before it was empty. This could be anything from a trail line no longer in use, an old dockyard, or simply a family home which has been fled.

For more information http://www.juntadeandalucia.es/cultura/caac/programa/alma11/frame.htm

Nancy Guzman

A great work which connects us to the city, and its collective memory. “Margen y Ciudad” is on until 4th of March. So don’t miss out on your chance to see it when you rent apartments in Seville in the wonderful city of Seville.

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Translated by: Poppy
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The narrator of the famous award-winning novel by Javier Marias “All The Souls” (1989), a character who many years later reappears again as the narrator in the trilogy “Tu rostro Mañana”,  confronted the awkward questions of his students at Oxford during the critical and disturbing two years spent there as a visiting professor inventing different fabulous etymologies of Spanish words hoping that nobody would bother -which would otherwise be in most cases quite useless-  checking in a specialized dictionary how those etymologies related to his responses to what the true meaning was.

If they had, and maybe some did, the result of their investigations, known in advance before their membership in the realm of pure invention, perhaps would have not have been too  different of what expected, it is quite possible that he had resorted to the wonderful, in every sense of the word  “Tesoro de la lengua castellana” of Sebastián de Covarrubias, published now exactly four centuries ago in which the etymologies offered often owe as much to the imagination of the writer as to the character of Marias, just concluding that “my insane crazy etymologies were not much more nor less plausible than the real ones … And in any case, as noted by Jack The Ripper, this type of ornamental knowledge lasted a few minutes, either being false, true or half-truths. Sometimes true knowledge is irrelevant, and then you can invent it.”

In fact, the least interesting thing about Covarrubias fascinating book is perhaps his degree of approximation to what we consider a scientific truth, and the most fascinating thing is how  it explores the cavernous interior of words to find in the current secret flowing water where a series of extraordinary stories about ourselves, our world and our own `inner-cave and a nightmare” are. A melancholic humor that squeezes the heart in a horrible dream, as a burden to push you down or fall directly into the trap

The words that join us with the world through stories and history as knowledge is not but the bottomless pit of those stories. The important issue here would be the basis on which we build the story. Sevilla is one of the most historic cities in Europe and the former grounds was precisely what allowed his bishop Isidore (570-636) found there the foundations of a peninsular historiography, perhaps a little damaging to the future of a Spanish unity of destination under the Visigothic monarchy, where he composed his Etymologies, an authoritative text in Europe for centuries, so fanciful and often fabulist like Covarrubias book or the inventions of the character of Marias, who published  twenty volumes of ancient knowledge, conveniently summarized in the service of ” Christian science”

Paul Oilzum

Visit this wonderful city and enjoy its historical surroundings, if you are curious about the origins of Spanish words, you can always read Bishop Isidoro’s books while you rent apartments in Seville

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Translated by: Marc
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Crossing the ancient Almohad wall, by the Arch of the Macarena, we enter one of the most popular neighbourhoods in the city, San Gil.

The heart of this neighbourhood is in San Gil Square (Plaza San Gil), which used to be presided by the parish which carried the same name and which now only preserves its Gothic front. In the 1940s, the Brotherhood of Our Lady of Esperanza moved to this church, building the Basilica of the Macarena, of classic Neo-baroque style, which occupies the northern part of the square.

Due to this, the false idea that this was the neighbourhood of the Macarena spread itself. But San Gil belongs to the old town district, inside the wall perimetre of Seville. La Macarena, however, as one of the city’s historical suburbs, is located outside the walls. The limit between both is established by Calle Resolana and Calle Parlamento de Andalucía. And so, the virgin is called ‘Macarena’ because of the neighbourhood and not the other way around, because the origin of the name is probably Roman.

We switch the register and go to another square, at number 3 where we find the Palacio de los Pumarejo, which gives the name to the field which was the residence of the Count Don Pedro Pumarejo, ‘Caballero’ twenty-four of the Lobby of Sevilla.

This 18th century house-palace became a Toribian school for boys in the 19th century. It finally became an inhabitable house in 1883. The top floor was restored to hold small homes, and in the lower floor they set up workshops and shops. Declared a Cultural Interest Heritage in 2003, it represents one of the most important examples of neighbourhood struggle so that such singular spaces aren’t allowed to disappear.

Walking down Calle San Luís we arrive to the church of Santa Marina, built after the Castillian conquest of Ishbiliya (Seville) in the 13th century, and it represents one of the oldest temples in teh city and a beautiful sample of Gothic style from Burgos and lower-Andalucian mudejar, inspired both by Christian spirituality as by Muslim mystique.

Lastly, following the same street, at number 27 we find the church of San Luís de los Franceses (St. Louis of the French), one of the most lavish Sevillian temples. Of Baroque style, it began to be built in 1699 by Leonardo da Figueroa, and it created its origin as a church of the ancient novitiate of the Jesuits.

Architectonically heterogenic and with a firm social identity thanks to the way of life of its neighbours, this is one of the neighbourhoods with the most popular, symbolic and imaginary strength in the city, the neighbourhood of San Gil.

Cinta Blanch

If you’re looking for apartments in Seville why not stay in the charismatic neighbourhood of San Gil, located in the beautiful historic part of the city.

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Translated by: aleixgwilliam
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