A STORY

I’m Alícia and this is both my personal site and a homage to my late father, who passed away due to cancer in early 2017. He’s the wandering man. He loved to go for walks. He’d go out in his Australian hat, his long coat and his white cane. He’d stroll to and from work, and during the weekend. To have a little coffee break, he’d wander in the birch alley near the river. He’d work standing up long before standing desks were a thing, always looking for a chance to stretch his long legs during his 11-hour days, 6 days a week. His energy wanders with me now, wherever I go. When I stretch my legs I think of him.I always cry when I think of you: there is a heaviness around it. I want to be more aware and discerning in those moments. I’m not sad because I think of you; I’m sad, because you’re not here anymore. I feel the heaviness of your tough end. But there was so much light and joy in you. I want to be able to stop sobbing when I talk or think of you, so that I can talk and think of you more.
I want to allow joy to flow through me more often. That’s a present I got from you. A strong capacity to feel bursts of joy at unexpected moments. A coffee while walking along the birch alley by the river, a burst of joy, a perfect moment.I’m a shy introvert, and so I struggle to fully express myself with others beyond one-on-ones or in writing. I work on my impulses in theatre lessons and acting groups. This page might offer me an avenue of expression.I’m a slow thinker…so I don’t usually have questions on the spot (the sign of a sharp mind, apparently…). I often don’t know what to say, and I don’t think I ever won an argument, if there is such a thing. The wandering man, my father, was quite the opposite: a fast thinker with a sharp tongue when needed, who didn’t care about what others thought.For a long time I thought of myself as I thought you were: very controlled.. Then, through lots of pain and social mismatches, I figured it out: it was just my desperate attempt for protection. I had hidden my emotions behind my rationality, which I clearly got from you. Mum can get in the emotion without losing herself in it. You and I can’t. Rivers of tears. But I didn’t know that about you till quite at the end. I guess with the illness and the bank threats you lost your armour too and that’s when I discovered how similar we were and got to know myself better.Now I can use that gift for my work, to feel in a room, to read between lines in a conversation, to sense-make with others.I learned languages because of you and chose business-related studies, because that’s what I had seen at home. Now I work to support a deep change in organisations' principles. Having seen both fosters my empathy to understand different types of incentives, challenges of parts of society, ways of thinking.I probably even live in Austria because of you, since it was one of your favourite places.I’ve often been told I should be “lighter”, that there’s a heaviness around me and how I go about things. I’ve been too much of a “good girl” in my life. There’s no lightness in that. I’ve cared too much about others’ needs and suppressed mine. I’ve given others all the space and waited for moments to be alone so that I could have mine. But now, it’s time to break things. Enjoy more, work less. Speak up more. The wandering man had an instinct for lightness. He was almost blind. He was not born in the era in which these conditions were fetishised, it was a curse. But he used his challenges to make fun of himself, not deprecatingly, but as an ice-breaker, bringing the truth forward in a light way. He made use of humour to navigate that impediment. He often said he didn’t see people, so he could say whatever. But that’s not true: when I don’t see people I dare even less. He learned to be brave.I don’t think I realised how brave you were until your personality started fading with the cancer and chemo rounds.The 2008 financial crisis blew my world away. It’s not even a world I really knew. I was 22 when it happened. At university I had been taught a picture of a world that didn’t exist anymore. It probably never did. The family business had to be shut down, my family got ruined, my dad fell sick. He died a few years later out of a horrible incurable cancer, at which time my extended family dispersed. My dad’s last months were surrounded by friends and acquaintances –they all went away when he died. It’s as if they were afraid we’d transmit a bad omen to them. Misery doesn’t like company, and this is an uncompassionate society we live in. The wandering man’s story has haunted me ever since.His tragic story weighs on me and also my need to celebrate him. His bright and colourful life in spite of his blindness. There’s room for lightness in death and celebration despite the pain, but not in a society that envelopes death and debt with shame. “No one can tell you how much you owe,” said David Graeber. That felt like a redemption, a weight off, no shame. Lightness.I think of my father’s passing as a political death, one of the consequences of the 2008 financial crisis, which caused so much stress, illness and death. His was a systemic death, but one of those that go down under the statistics of “cancer”. I know it was systemic exploitation. Even if we still live the illusion of capitalism, to me that was the end of an era. This is a killer system. That is one of my fuels for the work I do.I was 30 when you died, and I promised myself I’d still have the best decade of my life. And I have. I live the life I wanted, and I also live the inconveniences of the life I wanted, with too many geographical points, too many different types of engagements. I’m almost constantly feeling like a fish out of the water. But who would I be without that feeling? That’s something I can do, I’m always a learner, an attentive listener. I love new perspectives of looking at things, even if it might hurt. You were a total fish out of the water. I always think I was born in the wrong place, but you even more so.I want to keep finding lightness. I found it throughout your sickness and your death because thankfully, I was brave enough to quit traditional workforms. I was the luckiest person, because I came across the world of “purpose networks”. I found beauty, connection, care, freeing souls, new narratives; I can live in a more beautiful world here and now. I want to find joy in the climate catastrophe that develops every day little by little. I still want to be able to enjoy a too-hot January day in the middle of the Alps while I grieve this very same fact. Joy and sorrow.I remember you walking away with the nurse for one of your last chemo sessions. She was half a metre smaller than you. You were slightly curved and your blazer kept some of the old squareness of your shoulders. I know how fragile you were in that moment. I also remember you walking down the main street of our hometown with Mum. On the last day you went for a stroll, she was also almost half a metre shorter than you, holding you, being your pillar, like always. I remember I left some work I was doing, because I had a hunch you might soon not be able to go out anymore. So I ran down and caught up with you. I should have done the same the day you died. I knew something was off: already in a wheelchair and with an oxygen aid, it was the first day you hadn’t joined us for lunch. But I had an urge to finish what I had on my hands. I was applying for the Commons Summer School 2017. Little did I know that someday the commons would be so much in the centre of my life. I only came down when Mum called me. I caught your last breaths. It wasn’t peaceful: those last breaths were fights for life. And then stillness came, your body relaxed, and you left this world and all its problems.When you left, it was at a time when all my efforts hadn’t paid off yet. It was all very unstable. In my current world, people love the work they do, they are engaged for a greater good, and we support each other in being better human beings. We plant seeds for a better future to emerge someday. There’s truth, authenticity, and open hearts and minds. You’d be so proud of me.I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to you not being here. There is no end-stage for grief: it manifests in loops. At the beginning, I used to forget you were gone. I would want to tell you something exciting about a facilitation I had done or an opportunity that had come up only to realise a few seconds later that I’d never be able to do that. When I visit home I still lay the table with five forks and knives instead of four. Those moments don’t just make me sad anymore: I also smile and think of you.For the past seven years, in cafés in different corners of Europe, I’ve written about you. I have your obituary in my laptop’s pocket, and so we’ve wandered everywhere together. At first I had you in my notebooks, but you’d fly out accidentally in the middle of workshops and talks as I’d take some notes. I thought you were saying hi. I’d smile.It’s taken me these seven years to not just write about the pain of having lost you too soon. You are now a reminder of joy. We’ve wandered a lot together to get here.

• A Story
• About
• My work

My Landscapes

Contrasts

I was born in the flatlands in a mediterranean culture, those are my roots.
My landscape of choice are the Alps.
I live within this tension and complementarity.

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Some of my work

A Selection

Here you can find a selection of my work and, in a way, it's all I can show, apart from lists and brief descriptions of projects.
I have been working on processes for the past ten years, so the outputs to "share with the world" are non-existent if I don't take the time to write a blogpost about them.
During this past year, I have been working with more intention to capture some of the essence and learnings of my work, so that I can share some of what I learn.
My dream would be to produce an art-related output from each project.

Most of my work is based on accompaniments I do for organisations and networks/communities. I do all of it through the Greaterthan collective and my research through the P2P lab.I've been an active member of other networks such as The Economy for the Common Good, The Global Hub for the Common Good and Despierta (former women network in Barcelona). But my mother network and where I learned most of the basics of networks is Ouishare. I will always be grateful that my path brought me to such a special and fresh "place". I had never felt like this before. Ouishare changed my life.

Some nostalgia...

• A Story
• About
• My work