When Pau Palaus returned from his first trip to Lebanon, in May, he organized an event in the Plaça d’Arbúcies to explain the experience to his neighbors. He lives on the outskirts of the village in a farmhouse called Ca l’Ocell, where he has a small stage to rehearse shows and set up small-scale performances. Roser Loscos' violin was playing in the square, and the children were asking him questions. “And did you bring food to Lebanon?”, a girl asked him. Pau is a clown; with his company, he has visited about thirty countries, won awards like the Zirkólika, and a few years ago he set up the association Contaminando Sonrisas, with which he organizes solidarity expeditions to countries in conflict or places that have suffered natural disasters. It was the bombings in April, launched by Israel over the south of the country but also in the capital, and the contacts Pau maintains with some Lebanese clowns that prompted him to travel to Lebanon. Not to bring food, precisely, but rather “hope”: “Talking so much about the number of deaths, in the end we end up dehumanizing war, and what I try to do is bring a little humanity to the conflict”. He usually shares these trips with a small team of collaborators, but this time, for logistical reasons, he had to travel alone. He performed mainly in the most popular neighborhoods of Beirut, including Dahieh, the suburbs where Hezbollah is considered to have its main urban base, and where Israel usually has its sights set. In total there were 27 performances in less than two weeks, many improvised in the middle of the street, during days when bombs continued to fall despite the theoretical ceasefire. A ceasefire that never quite is, as has been demonstrated in recent weeks. “The bombings that fall during a ceasefire are the most dangerous, because people let their guard down. I thought I would find an empty city, with everything closed and people at home, and it's the opposite, shops are open, life goes on almost normally. In Beirut I spent the day watching the drones that flew over us all the time, but they didn't pay any attention to them.” During the last two days of my stay in Beirut, the suburbs suffered a new wave of attacks, in which the government of Israel claimed to have killed a high commander of Hezbollah, the Shiite paramilitary group allied with Iran. It is estimated that since the United States and Israel launched the offensive against Iran, there have been more than 3,000 deaths in Lebanon and one and a half million displaced people, mainly due to bombings ordered from Tel Aviv to attack southern Lebanon and occupy about thirty border towns. “During a performance I was giving, a group of people received a call saying that two missiles had fallen in their village and seven people had died. There was a bit of a commotion, but the show continued, and when it ended, those same people came to congratulate me as if nothing had happened.” During his nine days in Lebanon, Pau recounts having a dream: hundreds of buses arriving in Beirut loaded with clowns and invading the country. He told this to two Lebanese documentary filmmakers who were helping him set up performances in Beirut, and from this, a new project has emerged and is now underway: to record an eight-episode series in eight countries in the Middle East and North Africa to demonstrate that the work of a clown can be a symbol of peace and also of transformation. “They stopped making documentaries focused on war some time ago because they found it too emotionally taxing, but now they see the possibility of addressing it from the perspective of hope. The intention is to invite other artists who are willing to perform with me in these places,” he explains. The series will likely begin filming in August, taking advantage of Pau being invited to a circus festival in the town of Ramallah, in the West Bank.A destroyed capitalIn recent months, Pau has met some Lebanese clowns and artists, and from this have come different collaborations. Last week, for example, Contaminando Sonrisas promoted from Catalonia – with economic and logistical support – a series of performances by a pair of local artists who perform mask and puppet shows. “They were born in Syria but had to exile themselves to Lebanon and grew up in Shatila, a refugee camp in the heart of Beirut built in 1949 to host Palestinians fleeing the war. It can be said that it is already part of the city itself, but it is a very degraded place, with mafias and corruption, where young people have many difficulties finding work. Meeting this pair of artists with so much sensitivity has been like finding a flower in the middle of the rubble," he explains. This coming Wednesday, Pau will once again leave for Lebanon to perform in other areas particularly hard-hit by the war. He will visit the Bekaa Valley, near the Syrian border; two refugee camps in Tripoli, further north, and the peripheral neighborhoods of Beirut. In addition, he will conduct a free training workshop for about fifteen local clowns. “Many public services have not been functioning for years and the population has had to self-manage. I don't know if they have much hope left, but they have a lot of resilience,” he adds. During his performances in May, he was able to personally verify the accounts that Western media correspondents have been giving in recent times. On the one hand, the destruction that continues to plague the capital. “There are many damaged buildings, and for each one, they can tell you what year it was attacked. Apart from an explosion at the port [in 2020], which was brutal and it is still unknown who was responsible. The Lebanese say that life is what happens between one war and another, because conflicts have been constant throughout their history,” he laments.

Oriol Alamany (1958) has traveled across Arctic landscapes, mountains, and deserts around the world to photograph the wildest nature, often in extreme conditions. His work, which has helped to describe the lives of animals such as the snow leopard, the Etosha elephant, the brown bear, and urban falcons, has been published in prestigious magazines such as National Geographic and BBC Wildlife.

When he was 17, Pau Palaus saw a show by clown Leandre Ribera for the first time, and it changed his life. "I went to see him for three days in a row. My friends asked me, 'What does he do?' And I didn't know what to answer: he did nothing, and he did everything," explains Palaus. Although he studied forestry management, Pau left a steady job as a tree arborist to embark on the performing arts: "I started a clown course at the Rogelio Rivel school, but I only lasted two weeks because I didn't understand anything they were explaining to me; they didn't teach me how to do what that clown did."

In the office where Esther Gómez works, there is no sign with her name or that of her company. "It's common in the sector; it's done for confidentiality reasons," she explains. Esther wanted to be a private detective since she was little and ended up studying Private Investigation. Later, she added two specialties to her resume that have ended up taking up a large part of her work: handwriting expertise and what is technically called credibility assessment, "although everyone calls it lie detection".

Xavi Forné began designing concert posters for the bands he played in when he was still a teenager. Twenty years later, those flyers The black and white sketches that were passed from hand to hand have become international tour posters for bands like Metallica, Depeche Mode, the Black Keys, Soundgarden, and Foo Fighters, and are seen all over the world.

"There are organisations that talk a lot about innovation but when you ask them what innovation means to them they don't quite know what to answer." During the six years that he was director of technology for the United States Olympic Committee, Mounir Zok, born in Lebanon in 1977, travelled around the world speaking at conferences where he explained how technological innovation was revolutionising the world of sport and how many of these advances would end up being applied to other areas such as health or nutrition. In 2018 he decided to settle in Barcelona with his own consultancy, N3XT Sports, where he coordinates a team of professionals spread across France, the United States, Italy, Switzerland and Lebanon. With the pandemic he has changed constant flights for video calls and a more settled lifestyle: "We created the company in Silicon Valley but we wanted to move it to Europe. We made a list of cities where the sports and innovation industry was strong. London, Paris, Stockholm and Barcelona were pretty evenly matched. We made another of cities with the best quality of life, a place that was attractive enough to attract foreign talent. And in this Barcelona was unrivalled".