Sings and Tags
Last May, during the stay at City of Mexico, an image caught our eye: it was a parking prohibition traffic sign, something very common in any city. But on top of it this sticker had been stamped. It read: #LookingForFreePeople.
We have later learnt some more about this civic movement, which appeals to social, economical and political values and aims to promote, as declared in their mission, “full respect for people’s freedom and property”. At first, we were ignorant of all this argumentative background behind the logo. But we got captivated by its inspiring statement: it takes a lot, sometimes, to be really free, to be oneself, within this society so frequently determined to categorize and control us.
Deliberately or not, the sticker on the metal plate summed up two forces in aparent contradiction: the public rule against the citizen-driven impulse. No doubt the public spaces must be regulated; and civic respect is core to our life in society.
But it occurred to us that this “parking prohibited” sign embodied a metaphorical meaning too: the need to not park, to not station ourselves… It made us think that the quest for personal freedom should be a vital task to all of us.
In that way, this image worked as an appeal to individual empowerment, to full personal autonomy. A proposition that fully aligns itself with some of the nuclear messages we deliver from De los Pies a la Cabeza.
So it does with this game of propositions that Javier Hernández puts forward in his appearances: the goal to live with our circumstances, not against them or off them. And do not expect the others, be it society or the public powers, to walk the paths that we ourselves refuse to walk. We must overcome fear since it is the obstacle to a full living.
And we must call for the necessary conditions that will allow us to do so: the external ones must be socially established; the inner ones shall be built by each of us within ourselves.
Apart from the obliged public resources dedicated to help and rescue people and groups in need, we must individually consider that a (relative) dependence does not prevent a (total) independence. We should always hold a rest of rebellion against self-imposed convenience, against the confort-zones, against this fake ceilings that are erected from outside or built from our inside…
And certainly against the labels that aspire to define us, classify us, kidnap us. Funnily enough, sometimes the fight against tags is fought through the use of other tags: the social media hashtags. Or the one that appears in the logo of our social cycle:
Hasghtag…quí. An action aimed to optimize the community by optimizing the individuality. A daily effort to eradicate tags and make way for people.
Free people.