Yesterday our first visitor was Tommy. He told us that his grandparents have lived in Switzerland and he wrote a postcard for us. Juan Carlos had been working as a chauffeur in many countries all over the World and he said to us: Democracy in Uruguay is spectacular!

Jorge Castrillón talked about the development of the movimiento de los Indignados to Podemos in Spain. He told us about the challenges that they are facing when they succeeded in the elections in Barcelona and Madrid (both mayors are from Podemos): the attacks from Media, from the traditional right wing and left wing parties and the necessity to convert the participative grassroots movement into a working political organization.

Esteban Ramirez reports about censorship of artworks in Uruguay within the last 30 years of democracy – censorship in times of the dictatorship was clear, but he was interested in finding out more about how censorship appears in a democracy.

We were talking about  the „Año de la Orientalidad“ (the year of orientality – Uruguays official title is República Oriental del Uruguay) of Fernando López Lage, Eduardo Cardozo and Fernando Peirano in 1999 that leads our discussion to the fact that the democratic governments in Uruguay and Spain so far failed to find a way in dealing with the people that disappeared (and were murdered) during the dictatorships.

The laywer Raquel Busch questions the term ‚censorship‘ in the case of „Chau Bea“ of Juan Angel Urruzola. Family members had intervened and achieved a court decision that the artworks could not be shown publicly (it was a series of photos about a woman dying of cancer).

The artists that had been present yesterday night shared various stories about forms of censorship of artworks – a variety of creative, sublime or ridiculous forms of censorship – in France, Germany and Switzerland.

The evening ended outside of the Bar 7 Rayos – the guys started a Parillada („Since the dictatorship is over, we can do what we want and therefore start a Parillada tonight, because we want it.“) and Mauricio being so kind to offer us some Chorizo, bread and pickles. Thanks guys!