Artist
Leónidas Martín
Via Barcelona, Spain
As an artist, professor, activist and “expert joke teller,” Leonidas Martin has invigorated the wave of Spanish protests beginning in 2011 known as M15. When not teaching new media and political art at the University of Barcelona, writing about art and cultural politics for online and print media or directing and producing documentaries, Martin organizes social actions with the Barcelona-based artist collective “Enmedio” (which translates to “among” in English). One such action, which showcases the group’s trademark combination of interventionist tactics and politically engaged artistic practice, is Evictions Are Not Numbers, They Are Faces and Eyes (2012). For this action, which took place on the one-year anniversary of the first M15 protests, members of Enmedio pasted portraits of evicted Spaniards onto the storefront windows of banks around the country. The large photographs put faces to the names of those that the banks would not or could not support, frankly embodying the consequences of the financial crisis.
