This is a story of exemplary persons. Football and art. And takes place, at the same time, in a field, and an exhibition hall. The second season of LaLiga Genuine Santander, a competition which is played more than 600 footballers with intellectual disabilities, began the last weekend in Tarragona. 30 teams, almost double that of last year, are part of a pioneering project, to continue doing flag the visibility and the normalization, chosen to go hand in hand with the culture to achieve the integration. The exposure Your Half-Face Genuine displays the results of the workshops carried out last season, in which the players completed with paint, freely, half absent of the faces photographed for their peers. And has moved the president of LaLiga, Javier Thebes. “It’s just great. For me and for my family, there has been a before and after of LaLiga Genuine”. Thebes explains assertive that this will be the first of many projects LaLiga to reconcile sport and culture: “This is the way and what we are conveying to the Spanish society”.
coach of Celtic, in the center of the circle of players before the game. J. L. Sellart THE COUNTRY
“it is us who must learn from them”, indicated to the pair Thebes and Olga from the Source, director of the Foundation of LaLiga, which points to a supreme value of LaLiga Genuine Santander: “they Are playing football and representing their clubs. And, yet, here you are going before you share to compete”. The reactions of the players to look or to contemplate his works do not leave indifferent. Elijah, SD Huesca, he asks his coach, David Abardía, who completed his face with drawing pointillist. “It was Nicholas, who has syndrome of the wise”, to what you espeta Elijah: “I am wise, the syndrome is not what I need”. Abardía boasts of a self-portrait made its captain, Alberto, in spite of his difficulties with motor. It is the only one in the exhibition, with a vocation realistic, in addition.
Jokin plays in the right lane of the Real Sociedad Fundazioa and the portrait that he painted of Mary, a member of the technical picture of the team, you can see from the door of the hangar of the wharf of the port of Tarragona hosts the exhibition until mid-December. I did not know that he was there and was excited. “What have I done and is on-hook. It is better even than the game.” The following to what he aspires, he says, is to act in a play. And now you don’t see barriers. To him, Samuel –the one you have portrayed, taking the hands to the head of a scare– and several of the players most of the computer Genuine of the Real knows Xabi Prieto, a legend txuri-urdin, who has moved to Tarragona to support them. “The illusion that you feel these kids are about to get the t-shirt is indescribable. Spend time with them, learn from them, I feel that it has made me a better person,” says Prieto.
The mayor of Tarragona, Josep Fèlix Ballesteros, receives a gift from the president of LaLiga Javier Thebes. David Oliete
The members of the Foundation Celtic Integrates chose the face of his coach to be photographed and painted. In the box that inspired it, Francisco Diaz appears sitting in his wheelchair in front of a football field verdísimo colored with watercolors and markers. Diaz is the center of the rituals of the team before the start of the match. The players swirl around your chair and, in a circle, they sing with him: “yes, Yes, yes! Oh celtic!”.
Says the coordinator of the Fundación Rayo Vallecano, Doaa Abdelrazek, where most impact the sports programs and cultural around the experience Betgram Genuine is to strengthen the confidence of the participants. That is a virtue differential. And he gives as an example to Reuben, the player chosen by his peers to be the face of the Beam for the exhibition “for your eyes blue, and because it always helps everyone.” And the team’s goalkeeper: “martirizaba thinking that it was bad, I weighed believe that they might lose their fault. Today, they have won several interventions theirs at Villarreal FC. He is almost another person,” says Abdelrazek, an egyptian, master in management of sports bodies, which came 12 years ago to Spain for love.
Portrait of Conxita Esteve. David Oliete
The architect of Your Half-Face Genuine is Antonio Guerra, guidance counselor, specialist in psychology of disability, artist. He, in tandem with Rose Gabriel, holds the paternity of the project. Note that, in fact, it was the profile picture Of Gabriel in networks which did ignite in him the spark seminal. Started working at the beginning only with people on the autism spectrum. “We photographed people who had real ascendancy over them trying to interpret, express gestualmente, eight basic emotions: happy and very glad, sad, and very sad, angry, and very angry, scared and terrified. Then we remove with the editing, one-half of the face, and we ask that you respond with total artistic freedom”. Thank you to LaLiga Genuine Santander were able to open up the experiment to more groups.
War flip through the catalog and was going stopping at several images of the exhibition. “Artistically, some are fabulous. Abstraction, translating the sadness to cold colors and identifying it with the tears; or the relationship between complementary colors. We always find those who appeal to the single stroke, the silhouette, the black-and-white, there are always those who plasma attempts figurative and who runs away from the realism”. It is art, he asserts War, but transcends it to become a project eminently educational, in the case of those suffering from autism, it serves to improve the understanding of the own behaviour has an effect on the others.
A spectator photography one of the portraits. David Oliete
For those who have other types of intellectual disabilities, reasons to the artist, complete the face of someone known on the basis of their emotions, is a huge benefit to the development of emotional intelligence. “The understanding of the other is one of the great deficits that we all have. We suffer from a disability or not”.
20 years Ago War was working in a centre of Cordoba. His classroom came a boy with mutism, elective, David, who spoke only with his parents and his brother, and shunned all others. War had sought ways to reach him, without success. One day I sat in front of the window with the drawing table filled with papers, paints, waxes, acrylic. He limited himself to sit next to him and painted what he saw beyond the glass. David mimicked. “We swell up to the painting and, first, the workings of a conversation through which we’re painting. And, little by little, we are also talking about living voice. Dropped the barrier and there I thought: This is a channel of communication with the disability.”
From left to right: Miguel Ángel López, president of the Association Córdoba Autism, Conxita Esteve, a driving project, and Antonio Guerra, curator of the exhibition. David Oliete
To Conxita Esteve point to it since the Foundation of LaLiga, from the organization of the exhibition, all, as the soul of the initiative. Agree that without her and her involvement with the cause of the visibility of the disability, or does not exist LaLiga Genuine Santander or good would be something different and probably worse. Is optimistic and believes firmly that in the third edition will be contested by 42 teams present in LaLiga Santander and the 1/2/3. In conversation with Antonio Guerra says: “Seeing them play is not only exciting, it makes you down to earth. You put in question the things that matter in your day-to-day. I don’t think any guy from the grassroots to be able to feel the colors with intensity similar. They have another hierarchy of preferences”. Antonio Guerra nods and adds: “They, when they play, want to win and are upset, if they lose, but fight and struggle with a nobility of character, prioritise the enjoyment and do not distinguish in that goodness between partner and rival. They are incapable of any guile.
The mayor of Tarragona, Josep Fèlix Ballesteros, PSC, declares himself proud of the city they govern is at the origin of the birth of the competition, that it’s going to be the venue fixed for the opening of each season. Still from very close to the line of cal, distance of field, the performance of his team, the Club Gimnàstic of Tarragona. “Almost better than older,” he jokes, and then move on to boast of their efforts to make Tarragona an accessible city, because without inclusion there is no equity. In that instant, the Nastic fits a goal, and he interrupted his speech and turned. “Pity,” stammers. On the next play, a girl with a petite, half high that your advocate is driblarle inward from the left end. And Ballesteros burst out: “This is sport. Neither more nor less. The biggest teams, real Madrid and Barcelona, would also be here, because in order to standardize it and make it look like such, as mere sport, you first have to be extended. Also, for this reason, what has worked LaLiga this year by binding to a cultural project must not be in a timely action”.
