Terraced houses, the most traditional ones, the ones we find in most towns and old city neighborhoods, are usually positioned in the same way. They tend to have a narrow facade facing the street, a succession of rooms, and at the end, a patio or small garden. Casa 1902, designed by the Ofici: arquitectura studio, in Badalona, begins where others end. Here, before reaching the front door, a patio has been created that must be crossed.

This summer I wanted to fill my cinematic gaps (Ben Hur; E.T., the Extra-terrestrial; Terminator; Legally Blonde…) to cure my delayed FOMO. But recently I was forced to go to a cinema to see a film with no interesting female characters in which a tortured man struggles to return home; that is, Nolan's latest. Because cinematic FOMO is better tackled when it's fresh and recent and not buried under thirty-four fresher and more recent FOMOs. Until now I was strangely connected with the pre-Christian Greek people who knew nothing about the Odyssey and constantly heard about it.

The week ahead, with Jordi Garrigós

Some of the things we hope not to miss in the next seven days

I will listen to Charli XCX's new album. Music, fashion, film is the eighth album by the British pop star and a new, more rock-oriented turn in her prolific career. After dominating with the Brat summer, Charli Aitchison abandons green and embraces black and white to remain almost the only singer of her generation who plays with the mainstream while navigating the margins and experimentation. A singer who is living her particular artistic zenith, having more fun than anyone.

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«Kini» is no longer just the end of bikini: has become almost a suffix. Over the past few decades, it has been combined with all sorts of words to designate new ways of dressing – or undressing – the body on the beach. From the foundational bikini to monokini, the trikini, the tankini, the microkini, the burkini, the seekini or the most recent skirtkini. But if there was a turn that few of us saw coming it was the facekini: a piece that, instead of revealing more skin, completely covers our face to enter the sea. Before, however, that the brother-in-law reflex is activated and someone says that "the fashion world has once again invented another stupidity," it is worth giving it the benefit of the doubt. Because this disconcerting piece, in addition to the face, hides a story much less frivolous than it seems and, above all, offers an opportunity to question the way we look at clothes when they come from other cultures.

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Kris Ubach awaits us in the center of Mataró, where she lives. Not far from where she has a coffee, there is the memory of what her life as a lawyer, a career she studied, could have been. “I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to be a journalist. But you know those talks at the Institute to help you choose a career? Students from different careers came to explain their experience. And two guys who were studying journalism told us it wasn't a good idea. And they influenced me,” she admits, laughing. “So, I studied law. I thought choosing a career was a decision that would condition my whole life. When you're young, you think that way. Luckily, afterwards I've been able to make my own way,” she explains. “As a child, I had seen that film, TheGoonies, at the cinema. I saw it twice in a row. I wanted to have adventures. I read about pirates and adventurers. At 19 years old, I went to the United States with a boyfriend I had. At home we had always traveled, but of the four sisters we are, I was the one who became an adventurer,” she recalls.

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"Every day that Asra goes to school, I am very happy…", says Anita with a broken voice, and she can no longer continue the sentence because she bursts into tears. Asra is the 13-year-old daughter who this year has completed the second year of ESO. If they had stayed in Afghanistan, if they had not been able to flee, Asra would now be confined to her home and would not have been able to start secondary education, because the Taliban have prohibited girls from studying from the age of 12. “In Afghanistan I have my sister, my nieces, my sister-in-law… They are there, unable to do anything”, laments Anita, who tries to compose herself while wiping away her tears. “Here we are fortunate”. That is why she does not miss any opportunity to work, study, get to know new places or even play football. She wants to enjoy every moment of her freedom. Because that is what she values most about being here: freedom.

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Anyone who wanted to swim in the sea 100 years ago didn't have it easy. People who lived near the sea still had the bad habit of throwing trash into the water. The factories that had been built on the Barcelona coastline were polluting the sea more and more. Chronicles speak of dead animals, all sorts of debris and industrial waste that deterred many swimmers. The most determined began to go a little further out to sea with "patinadors", modest boats that were essentially a small catamaran, with two canoes joined by a plank. They would climb on board and, by rowing, would go to the clean waters. At the beginning of the 20th century, the bathing clubs of Barcelona and Badalona rented these "patinadors", until someone had the idea of putting a mast with a sail on them. And so was born the most typical vessel of Catalan sailing: the "patí de vela", which has celebrated its 100 years of life in good health.

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There are many movies that I haven't seen. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the tragedy, until the lockdown I hadn't seen Dirty Dancing (what a marvel) nor Pretty Woman. I wanted to take advantage of this series of articles to efficiently fill some of my cinematic gaps. In an era of massive audiovisual offering and absolute atomization of channels, I cure my FOMO in deferred. This week I saw Dances with Wolves for the first time and these are my notes:

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It's hot. Very hot. Too much. And I don't formulate this evidence as an experienced climatologist, but as a simple inhabitant of a world increasingly close to boiling point. Faced with this climatic exceptionality, which is already sensed as the new normal, the much-coveted air conditioning units, despite the immediate well-being they provide, contribute to heating the outside even more. Perhaps that's why, in the midst of a climate emergency, the oldest solutions are once again proving their validity. And is there anything more ancestral than a fan?Just a few years ago it seemed that this object had been relegated to a simple folkloric souvenir, adorned with inevitable kitsch Hispanism motifs. Today, on the other hand, it has regained its place as one of humanity's oldest, simplest, and most sustainable technologies. But, has this always been its function: to make wind? And, despite being an inseparable complement to the flamenco stereotype, is Spain really its place of origin?

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Joan Riera doesn't stand still. The world is very large, as is his curiosity. When he speaks with ARA, he already has a trip to Equatorial Guinea ready to trace the steps of the Spanish colonial era and interact with the local population. Then he leaves for the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This anthropologist from Vallès has specialized in studying and visiting isolated communities. "My father had a great interest in African art and its influence on contemporary art. And this led us to go to Cameroon when I was young. We established a relationship with those countries, to the point that my father would end up buying a house and staying there to live," he explains. It would be logical to think that it was during those periods in Africa that he decided he would be an anthropologist. But listening to himself, Joan has discovered that it is not exactly like that. "I believe that my love for anthropology, for other people and the worlds that end up being born thanks to my grandmother. A farmer's daughter who raised me as a child in a farmhouse in Cerdanyola, in Collserola. She used to tell me stories of a rural Catalonia that I no longer knew. I believe that those nights in her bed listening to what she told me, whether they were tales or lessons on how to know the land, were key." An umbilical cord connects a Catalan farmhouse with the rituals of populations living very isolated in southern Sudan, one of the trips Joan was most eager to take. And which he has finally been able to do and it has moved him.

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A sign from the gods, a bad omen, a cosmic wonder, an evidence that mathematics governs the visible world... Eclipses have fascinated humanity since the dawn of time. And at each historical stage they have been interpreted in different ways. Today we know that an eclipse is "the total or partial occultation of a celestial body by the interposition of another celestial body between it and the observer". But perhaps it was more romantic to believe that a dragon devoured the sun, as they thought in China in the 8th century BC.

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The French beach of Pampelonne, which during the seventies and eighties became one of the great symbols of European body liberation, is far away. Press photographs showed stretches of sand dotted with umbrellas and bodies where the "topless was not the exception, but the rule. Neither were the Costa Brava, the Costa Daurada, the Costa del Sol or Ibiza, where the spirit hippy and the impulse of the sexual revolution turned the bare breast into an expression of freedom. Slim Aarons' photographs immortalized that carefree way of inhabiting Mediterranean leisure, where the semi-naked bodies of bathers were part of the landscape naturally, without dramatization or scandal. It was not about sexualizing the body, but precisely about freeing it from the gaze that turned it into an object and lightening it from the weight of centuries of moral demonization.That landscape, however, today seems almost an archive photograph. Not only because fifty years have passed, but also because the reality it represented has been fading away. The topless, which for decades was part of the usual landscape of Mediterranean beaches, is today an increasingly exceptional practice. Data suggests that, compared to the eighties, it has decreased by two-thirds. And the paradox is that the women who continue to practice it the most are precisely those who grew up during the sexual revolution. The youngest, on the other hand, have barely even incorporated it. What has happened for what seemed like a conquest of bodily freedom to have retreated?Breasts are exactly the same as forty years ago. What has changed is the world that observes them. When a woman decided to leave them exposed, she knew who would see them, how, and for how long. Upon leaving the beach, that exposure also ended. Today, however, a woman can leave the sand, but if someone has taken a photograph of her, her image will continue to circulate indefinitely on others' screens, becoming, in the best case, content for social media and, in the worst, an advertisement for sexual content pages. The moment a photograph escapes our control, so does a part of our body.Furthermore, social networks, along with the media, have exponentially intensified the pressure on bodies, which seem to have to respond more than ever to canons of perfection to deserve to be shown. Beaches and swimming pools have ceased to be friendly spaces for body diversity. Bodies forced to coexist with the scrutinizing gaze of others and, above all, with their own, often even crueler, the result of low self-esteem eroded by a system that turns insecurity into a business.When the feminist struggles of the seventies denounced the sexualization of women's bodies, they already sensed that this battle would not be easy. Half a century later, it continues to be one of the great open fronts. There will be those who consider it inevitable to sexualize female breasts, as if it were a natural instinct against which it were useless to rebel. But history shows precisely the opposite. During the first half of the 20th century, male nipples were also the object of censorship and scandal. Only when men began to uncover their torsos normally on beaches did that moral burden gradually fade. The sexualization of the body, therefore, is not immutable, but simply the result of a cultural construction, even if we want to dress it up as natural.The paradox is that we have never lived with so many images of naked bodies and, yet, for decades these have not been so unfree. Captives of aesthetic pressure and the surveillance society, the youngest have inherited more images of the body than their mothers, but less freedom to inhabit it.

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Some people are born to sail. Like Alberto Mir (Barcelona, 1968). Although he studied economics, he couldn't stop thinking about the sea. “When we were little, we used to sail at the Real Club Nàutic de Barcelona, with some wooden optimists. My parents already sailed and my grandfather participated in the dragon class in the Rome Olympic Games of 1960 – he recalls–. I studied economics and had a job at La Caixa. But I wanted to sail around the world. I looked at the map and had a great desire to do it”. And so it was: sailing would be his life. He would look for jobs taking care of boats or moving them from port for many years. And now he is a ship captain and has sailed around the world a few times. Trained at the English Royal Yachting Association, he has helped many people sail around the world. He knows all the coasts, all the seas, and accumulates experiences and anecdotes. The most special, however, was sailing by sailboat to Antarctica, an experience he recounts in the book La Antártida a vela (Nova Casa Editorial, 2026).

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The week ahead, with Jordi Garrigós

Some of the things we hope not to miss in the next seven days

I will finish McCartney: the hunt for the lost bass, about the mysterious disappearance and recovery of Paul McCartney's first bass, a Höfner 500/1 bought in Hamburg in 1961 for only 30 pounds. This marvel sounded on the original recordings of Love me do, she loves you and the early Beatles classics. A road movie musical about the greatest pop group of all time.

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There are people who have the talent to make you feel expected. Jordi is one of them. It's not just a way of serving tables or learned cordiality; it's also a way of looking, listening, and always finding the right word. In his restaurant, hospitality is not a gesture: it's a way of understanding life. That's why, when you cross the door of Can Facundo, you feel like you've been there before, even if it's your first time.

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The so-called society post (post-Fordist, post-industrial, postmodern, post-analog and, also, post-COVID) in which we live, confronts us as individuals continuously with ambiguity, the new defining substance of the character of urban life in the 21st century.

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Fashion is political. When we decide to wear flat shoes instead of heels, put on ripped jeans, or tie a tie, we are making a statement about how we want to position ourselves in the world. As feminists proclaimed in the seventies, drawing heavily on countercultural thought, the personal is political. It is no wonder, then, that throughout history institutions, ideologies, and parties have tried to appropriate the symbolic power of clothing to persuade, construct identities, and, at times, also dominate.The latest episode has been starred by Pedro Sánchez's government, which a few days ago presented DMOCRACIA, a graphic campaign built with all the codes of a streetwear brand, with a slogan that leaves no room for doubt: "When you dress, you position yourself". The initiative, framed within the acts commemorating fifty years of democracy, aims to bring this political system closer to the younger generation, with an urban aesthetic and the accompaniment of a battalion of influencers. The first reaction, I confess, is to look around for the hidden camera. It's hard to decide if we are facing an institutional campaign or a parody of gigantic proportions. But, once the absurdity is accepted, it's worth asking: is it a genuinely Spanish extravagance, or does dressing political ideals have a history older than it seems?The Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David, known for works such as The Death of Marat or The Oath of the Horatii, played an active and committed role in the French Revolution. Convinced that, in addition to establishing a new political and social order, it was also necessary to give it a visible form, he designed various outfits to define the appearance of the new republican citizen. Through the three colors of the flag, references to Republican Rome, and inscriptions such as Liberty, Equality or French People, he aimed to create a new visual code for a society governed by revolutionary ideals.However, the project did not prosper. History has shown that, apart from regimes that impose a certain appearance – as in the People's Republic of China, where the Zhongshan suit (Mao suit) became hegemonic attire under strong pressure – fashion is not adopted by decree. People do not simply wear what a government prescribes, but what emerges from a complex network of desires, identifications, aspirations, and social dynamics. Politics can try to dress an ideology, but not decide what society will wear.

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