You've recently returned to Euskal Herria. How are you?

The landing has been a little violent, as always. After all, I've spent five years in New York, and there I had everything I needed to make life; it was hard to move.

He's come to Santutxu.

I started looking for a flat in New York and I met another Bilbao, because I'm from Galdakao, and when I left, at 22, for someone who lived in Galdakao, it was Bilbao the juerga of the weekend, not a place to live. I looked on the Internet and there I started to get a little bit more to the neighborhoods (I won't live in the middle), and so we got here.

We are now in Karmela, in the free space of the project launched by the neighbors of Santutxu, in the building of the old ikastola Karmelo. Didn't you know before you came?

In the last ten years, and especially in the last five years, I've lived Euskal Herria through a screen, so I knew a lot of things going on in Bilbao, but I couldn't put them on the map. I met on the net what was then called Karmelo and it was a surprise to get home and see that this one now is Karmela was under my house.

What is your relationship with Karmela?

In New York, I started climbing in the rocodrome, and I saw that there was a climbing group being formed here, a lot of groups and projects are being formed, and then I wrote to them, and I asked them if the rococo group was open and if the assemblies were open. The two were open, and since then I've come to the assemblies on Tuesdays and it's been an amazing experience. In addition, this space has worked a year and a peak, so it offers opportunities to do everything.

Has the impression that it brought from outside changed?

When I got here, I understood that everyone, except me, knew everyone. It is not, however, an obstacle. Compared to what I thought before I came, I've seen that everything is more confusing and imperfect. After all, what is received via the internet or in the press always takes such an order, and that order always takes a harmony, and everything looks great, and when reality comes it is as it is and never so perfect, but I think things are happening.

I have the impression that, after the crisis and the ceasefire, some paradigms were questioned and other speeches began to gain strength, especially those related to feminism, fortunately. From the outside, it seemed to me that social movements were becoming more and more important, and now it seems to me that all of this has more potential than I thought.

I'd like to come to your job. How does the reader become a literary researcher?

As you said, I came to Basque philosophy because I was a reader. Not everyone comes as a reader. I studied in Deusto and there were two options in my day, one of which was to specialize in linguistics and the other was literature. There were few of us who came out of this second branch. The studies gave me tools to read differently, but it is true that after doing Basque philology I left Euskal Herria, because I needed it, I don't know very well why, I don't know now and I didn't know it then, but I was clear that I had to leave, and after a time of absence I decided that I wanted to go back to that attitude of critical reader, and so I came from England to Barcelona.

So you were first in England. Was that a great lesson?

England and London breathed away, I looked from afar, to the place where I was, to the influence that was exerting on me. On the other hand, the readings were completely opened to me. I remember working in London in the afternoon, distributing the newspapers, holding free the mornings and spending them at the British Library, right next to my house.

And in Barcelona?

There, I knew all or most of the critical theories that I still use as a basis, in a systematic and corporal form. There I knew another way to get closer to literature. When I arrived in Barcelona I wanted to investigate the short stories, that is, I had in my head a rather orthodox approach to literature, and Barcelona was a bomb.

What is the difference between the Orthodox approach and the one you met in Barcelona?

On the one hand, they are not two entirely differentiated approaches, but they are in a succession. However, it would be a fundamental difference, which at first took the text as an object of relationship, and then, it was not the text but the body the site, that is, how the body itself is related to the text, how the body itself is related to the environment and to the text, to other bodies…

Therefore, is it not so much an analysis of the book as something isolated, but rather an analysis of the society in which you live through the books produced by that society and cultural production?

That is, and to take a second turn to that, that is, society produces texts and texts produce society, and therefore, see what happens in those movements. But it is not a question of what comes, but of what relations of subordination arise in this continuous production, of what possibilities there are to face these subordinations and of how many texts, images and videos can find ways of resistance.

Why did you go to New York later?

I decided for a city without a choice, due to an indefinite need. I was writing my thesis and at that moment you can leave. In principle they are stays of three months, but I said I wanted to go for a year. They told me, "You pay for insurance," I said, "Yes, and it's over."

What has the experience been like?

I think it's still worthy of her. There I realized my whiteness more than ever, I have seen the cracks of what is called the multiculturalism of the cleaners, there I have also had a million opportunities. In New York, you're always 25 years old.

I had the opportunity to go into the University of the Basque Country after working as a visiting researcher, and I have to say that from here arises those illusions, that the universities of the United States are impressive, and well, there are universities, but not the university system itself.

But you were in Columbia, and Columbia is a kind of superuniversity, right?

Yes. From the point of view of reading, it has completely changed me. In a place like this, a very powerful community is created, and its only function is to think. Of course that has its dark spots. Columbia is a bubble found in a totally oppressive city.

Could you give me some examples of this?

Manhattan is one of the world's financial capitals. When we talk about 1% of the population, we're talking about the people who live there. Then you walk around Manhattan and go to homeless people sleeping in a bank shed: there are the two ends of a hundred percent.

What was the difference between where you lived and Manhattan?

I lived in Brooklyn, by subway, an hour and a quarter from Columbia. In Brooklyn, more than three million people live. I was a very specific species in the city: man, white, university, who received a kind of scholarship to teach. It's not a spectacular income, but there's enough to be the first agent of gentrification. That's why I'm happy to live in Santutxu, because there's still no such conflict in this neighborhood.

Could you explain to me the gentrification process?

I lived in New York, in a prewar house where I could pay for it. This type of housing has a fixed rental type: the annual rent increase is not decided by the market, as it is usually said, but by the city or the state. So it goes up very little and people can stay a lot of time in those homes. The majority of the inhabitants of my bloc had been there for about 30 years, were older and from the Caribbean area. Most women and most black.

I lived there for three years, and the bodies that in the beginning and in the end came in and out of the block changed a lot. Why? Well, just because an area in the neighborhood had become a really cool area, and then people started coming to that area where I lived and throwing out the people who lived there. When a neighbor leaves, the rent price goes up a little bit, as far as the law allows, and another one comes in. My species doesn't live in such a house for 30 years, many just a year ago. Then, gradually, the price is rising and, upon reaching a certain amount, the apartment is released to the market. And it's over.

And what do you do about that?

That was also New York for me: how to manage the subordinations that I and my body produced without me deciding, how to change the things that I imposed without me deciding.

You're now analyzing desires.

Desire is not only who loves and who is fought with, desire is what life we want, if we want a state… There is an idea of norm, and it is not binary, but a line. Our bodies are located along that line and we can wish them according to the norm.

When I say that I want an independent Basque Country, what do I mean, what other desires do I set in motion? You can't want a people in the air, and we have to manage some desires, we have to be very masters of some desires.

For example?

I see two hegemonic desires; one, the neoliberal desire, that is, the desire of the self-sufficient entrepreneur: I am alone and I build the people against others; the other is more ethnic, pulling the hypothesis of Silvia Federici: The ethnicist desire of the Basque Country conceives the body of women as a factory for the production of bodies.

Is there a connection between them?

In the end, there is always a male category. When we say that the Basques we come from, I do not know where and I do not know from when, that we have come here from generation to generation, that we are the oldest in Europe, we reflect in an idyllic way the figure of women, it is a concrete domination, a people that there wants to promote the domination of the female body. The people who desire in the neoliberal desire promote exploitation: I have it, and I will have something you will not have.

Of course, I myself want a good and dignified life, but what does this mean?

Can we not achieve a good and dignified life by more precisely managing the subordinations of power?

I think it is possible. Questions about the future are often dangerous. I always say: do it, try to do it. A space like the Karmela offers this possibility. Things will go a few times better and then worse, but do it, try it and something will come out, and if it doesn't go well, it will fix it. There is no more.