2 Femmes en 2CV: A ‘Road Trip’ that became a tribute to ‘Thelma & Louise’
This is a story of two women trying to leave all ties behind. To break the chains of a society that wants us quiet, obedient, normative, productive, fertile, alienated and consumers of capitalism. It is a story of leaving everything behind to seek freedom, to discover who we are and what we want in live. To stop waiting to start acting. And it is a small story, of two women who, without being specially brave or singular, decided to check for ourselves what happens when you leave the confort zone.
Somebody said
‘Get a life’. And so they did.
Like Thelma and Louise, we are Eva and Ana, the main characters in this adventure about friendship, feminism, slow travelling and building a way of life far from conventions. One day we decided that it was time to take control of our lives and write our own story. With that innocence of something that goes directly to the heart and that strength of the impulsiveness. When you behave by heart, without thinking too much of the consequences. When thinking or planning is overrated.
The trip changed completely our lives and allowed us to be aware that we can achieve whatever we want, that limits are mental barriers that we need to overcome and it is precisely out of the comfort zone when you can have the best experiences.
On a piece of blue sky they started the trip. The starting point, hidden within their hair, were the lines of the brain where -like seeds-, questions and worries were gathered. Below the bone marrow they spent the first days, riding the vertebras purely excited, until they reached a flat path, the thin sole of their feet where, resting without any hurry, they felt well.
Gustavo Duch.
The book
The peculiar trip of two women riding a 2CV until Middle East
A story of empathy. Sorority. Discovery. A living proof of forgotten conflicts even before they started. Like the biggest migration crisis of the history of Humanity, the failed military coup in Turkey or the war in Nagorno Kharabakh. A 20-months trip in which two women driving a Citroën 2CV cross Europe by the Mediterranean Sea, the Middle East and the Caucasian countries.
Seat with us in the back seat of the car and travel with: Thunder, a Citroën 2CV from 1983; Ana Vega, journalist and humanist from Mallorca; Eva Serra, Catalan publisher.
How it all starts
“Ana, yes, I am coming with you, I don’t know how we are going to do it, I have no money and I don’t even know what I am going to explain to everybody, but we are going to do this crazy thing together”. What starts being a crisis of the thirties, ends up being a total revolution. Frustrated with our comfortable lives, and feeling life can be more than that, we take control of it. Trying to create something constructive with all that energy that we have, we start to think if we should start a business, change jobs, residence… But nothing seems fine. The idea of the trip starts one day that Ana tells me: “Eva, I am so tired that I think I will just leave everything behind, take my 2CV and drive along the Mediterranean coast to Istanbul. You should come”. In that moment I think of two possibilities: 1. I can not do it; 2. Ana is going to do it and I will just look at her making her dream come true. But the seed is already in my head, and a morning of April, stressed in a middle of a traffic jam, I call her. It is one of those moments in life when you feel something very strong inside and you decide to do something about it.
The Strike
Our trip manifesto
There is a beautiful writing which belongs to a beautiful book named “Lots of tiny people” by Gustavo Duch, with which we feel completely identified and has become the manifesto of our living adventure:
“From now on we declare, we will not work anymore to finance those despotic states which steal our homes or sustenance, nor even for depressive states that steal our happiness. Slave work has come to an end. We interrupt immediately and forever the consumerist consumerism that consumes our smiles and devour seas, lands, skies and waters. People are not the Market, we affirm – market is just a meeting place. Sexism attitudes that insult love, care, and embrace, are proclaimed inactive in perpetuity. We strictly say it: we plant ourselves! We stand firm, we plant ourselves, like rebel seeds on Earth, facing the arrogant abuses that we commit over it.
We declare in general and permanent strike hunger and pain, bad love and bad humour. We will keep wars in indefinite strike. To those who make wars we will suspend them of all of their positions, forever and ever, so be it. We declare forever interrupted the search of materialist wealth responsible for all poverties. Within mates, with knowing souls, we swear to occupy every second, minute and hour that we do not spend now, in the collective construction of a permanent state of happiness”.
Lots of tiny people. Gustavo Duch. Pol·len Edicions.
