Malasaña’s Statues and Digital Social Change

There are several bronze “urban statues” around Madrid, especially in the neighborhood of Malasaña, that depict ordinary people doing everyday things. There are many statues such as “the reader,” “the young woman walking” and “the student from Malasaña.” Some people have confessed to confusing these statues for people so I can see why it was ideal for El Grupo Turin, an organization Sedoac is part of, to make these statues come to life by dressing them like domestic workers. Yesterday, July 13th, at 8:30 am, five women from El Grupo Turin, including Sedoac’s president, decided to dress four of these statues with aprons, cleaning gloves and other cleaning supplies before going to the Ministry of Employment and Social Security. They were followed by several news chains such TeleMadrid and Televisión Española that asked them about their stories and also recorded the many songs they sang along the way. My favorite part of this event was when we took the metro on our way to the Ministry and Rafaela Pimentel started to sing about an undocumented woman named Adela who is suffering as a domestic worker because she does not have the same rights as other workers. The director of Change.org in Spain, Jose Antonio Ritoré, who I did not even know was part of Change.org, took the metro with us since he had to give us access to entering the Ministry and asked that I send him the video of the sing “Adela.”  I was also asked to scan my camera equipment along with those of the news chains before entering the Ministry and since I had been told about this event through a WhatsApp message in such an unofficial way, having to do this kind of legitimized the importance of the event. This also made me understand why Sedoac’s members get disappointed when news chains fail to show up to their events; in other words, having their interviews on television is an important way to visibilize their realities and what they are fighting for. Rafaela Pimentel is part of the organization “Territorio Domestico” and the person who started the petition on Change.org to ask the Spanish government to ratify El Convenio 189. This petition reached 100 thousands signatures so this event was a formal way to literally (we had 3 boxes filled with signatures) deliver these signatures to the Ministry of Employment and Social Security.