Simona Levi is a theatre director, playwright, activist, technopolitical strategist, cultural manager and curator, and lecturer. Born in Italy and with Spanish nationality, she has been living in Barcelona, Spain, since 1990. She is an activist in the field of freedom of expression and information, digital rights, the free flow of culture and knowledge, strategic use of digital tools for collective action, institutional accountability, protection of whistleblowers and the fight against corruption and disinformation. She has also participated in movements in defence of the right to housing and use of public space.
She is one of the founders of Xnet, the Free Culture Forum, the anticorruption movement 15MpaRato, and the Citizens Group against Corruption at both Catalan and Spanish levels. Simona Levi is coauthor of #FakeYou, Fake news and disinformation - Governments, political parties, mass media, corporations, big fortunes: monopolies of information manipulation and cuts to freedom of expression, published by Rayo Verde (2019).[2], Votar y Cobrar - La impunidad como forma de gobierno published by Capitan Swing (2017), Tecnopolítica, internet y r-evoluciones - Sobre la centralidad de redes digitales en el #15M and editor of Cultura libre digital - Nociones básicas para defender lo que es de todxs, both of which were published in 2012 by Icaria.
In 2017, Rolling Stone magazine chose Simona Levi, as the founder of Xnet and for her work with 15MpaRato, as one of 25 people in the world who are shaping the future.[1]
Simona Levi has been leading Xnet's Democratic Digitalization of Education Plan since 2019 to replace the proprietary tools from big tech companies in schools.[2][3] As a result of this experience, in 2021, she published for the Publications Office of the European Union the report "Proposal for a sovereign and democratic digitalisation of Europe" at the request of the President of the European Parliament.[4]
Simona Levi of Xnet in the dialogue "Internet access, a new human right"
Artistic career
A theatre director, actress and dancer by training, Simona Levi studied performing arts at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris, where she worked as a programmer in the squatter arts space L’oeil du Cyclone. She started touring as an actress with several companies in 1982, eventually settling in Barcelona in 1990. In 1994 she set up Conservas in the city's Raval neighborhood. This is a venue promoting local, innovative, independent performing arts based on a self-production paradigm.[5]
In 1999, she founded Compañía Conservas, and that same year the company presented its first stage production, Femina Ex Machina, directed by Levi and Dominique Grandmougin. The piece was awarded the FAD Special Critics Price and the Aplaudiment Award, and toured extensively to festivals and theatres in Europe (Spain, France, the UK, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, Norway, among others) for more than two years. In 2003, again with Dominique Grandmougin, she directed the company's second production, 7 Dust, which premièred at Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona. The production toured through several European countries, including Italy, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Finland, Slovenia and Poland.
In 2007, with Marc Sampere, she co-directed the third show by Compañia Conservas, Realidades Avanzadas, which questioned representative democracy and the concept of property. This work is based on the open-source model. At the end of the performance, audience members could take home a CD-ROM with the texts, videos, music and images used in the show. The idea for the production was sparked by a video posted on YouTube in October 2006 that denounced real estate speculation and included footage recorded with a hidden camera in the anti-mobbing office at Barcelona City Council. The video was removed from YouTube at the request of the bank La Caixa, which alleged copyright infringement based on the use of images of one of its branches.[6]
From 2001 to 2011, Simona Levi directed the Performing and Applied Arts Festival InnMotion, which is held at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. [7] [From 2008 to 2013 she directed the stage production of the oXcars.
She is scriptwriter and director of the play Hazte Banquero - Tarjetas Black: todo lo que quisieron ocultarte (Become a Banker: Black Cards, Everything They Wanted to Hide from You), a documentary looking at the “black credit cards” corruption case and revealing the modus operandi of the top management of the bank Caja Madrid by means of a selection of 447 emails sent to and by the bank's president Miguel Blesa.[8] The work premiered in July 2016 in the Poliorama Theatre, Barcelona, as part of the city's Grec Festival and has also been performed in several venues including the Fernán Gómez Theatre in Madrid and the Rosalía de Castro Theatre in A Coruña. After seeing the show in Madrid, the HSBC whistleblower Hervé Falciani said that he could “see the future” in this dramatisation of data.
In 2018, she directed the play Advanced Realities 2, which premiered at the Festival Grec de Barcelona.[9]
Activism
Simona Levi is one of the founders of eXgae (now Xnet), a non-profit association created in 2008 which explores alternative models for cultural diffusion, copyright and democracy in the digital age. Since 2008, Xnet, with the support of Conservas, has organised the annual oXcars, a non-competitive awards ceremony, which places the spotlight on projects created in different arts disciplines based on the paradigm of free culture.
As a member of Xnet, she is staging director of the oXcars and also coordinator of the FCForum, an international arena in which organisations and experts in the field of free/libre knowledge and culture work towards creating a global strategic framework for action and coordination. She is also a founding member of Red Sostenible (Sustainable Network), a citizen platform created in January 2010 to combat the introduction of the anti-download legislation known as the “Sinde Law” in Spain, and to defend Internet rights.
In 2010, she appeared before the Spanish Parliamentary Sub-Committee on Intellectual Property Law reform to defend the proposals contained in the “Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge”, a document that was drafted collectively by participants of the FCForum. In her presentation, she offered an overview of some of the omissions in the legislation and put forward possible solutions included in the Charter, such as the abolition of Spain's levy for private copying or “canon digital” and the need to reform copyright collecting societies which, she pointed out, “hinder the free circulation of knowledge and sustainability for authors.”
Simona Levi is a member of the 15M movement in Spain and founder of the group 15MpaRato, which filed a lawsuit against the banker and former IMF Managing Director Rodrigo Rato, an action that launched the Bankia trial in Spain after an anonymous source used the Xnet anticorruption mailbox to give access to the web domain http://correosdeblesa.com with more than 8,000 emails from the Inbox of Miguel Blesa, president of Caja Madrid from 1996 to 2009. These revealed, for the first time, the existence of the so-called Black Cards (tax-free, corporate credit cards for associates of Caja Madrid–Bankia), how the bank bought and sold the City National Bank of Florida, and how the bank's customers were defrauded by the preferred stock scheme. In June 2015, Xnet published a selection of the Blesa emails through four online media sources. The Spanish National Court admitted the case and charged Rodrigo Rato and the former board of directors with fraud, falsification of accounts in order to attract investment, and improper management, among other crimes.[10][11]
Simona Levi is a member of the Grupo Ciudadano contra la Corrupción (Citizens Group against Corruption), a network which works at both Catalan and Spanish levels to strengthen already-existing initiatives to protect whistleblowers, coordinate them and facilitate exchange of information among them.
In 2015–2016, as a member of the Advisory Council of the Barcelona City Hall Office for Transparency and Best Practices, she initiated and worked to install the Ethical and Good Governance Box, a complaints box by means of which citizens can report corruption and other practices that are damaging for good governance in the city of Barcelona.[12] This mailbox, similar to that already produced by Xnet, is the first such box to be promoted by a government (in this case that of the city of Barcelona). Once the mailbox was presented in public, Levi announced her resignation from the advisory board. She advises several institutions such as the Government of Spain, the Government of Catalonia and the City Council of Barcelona.
Since 2019, together with a group of families, Levi has designed and leads Xnet's Plan for Democratic Digitalization of Education. This project includes:[13][14]
The development of a comprehensive, auditable, agile and interoperable IT tool called DD (Digital Democratic) to replace the proprietary tools in all the activity of the schools. This tool has already been implemented in 11 schools in the city of Barcelona since 2021, in collaboration with the Directorate of Democratic Innovation of the City Council and the Consortium of Education of the city.
A program of reform of the educational system for digital training that started with the I International Congress on Democratic Digital Education and Open Edtech (2022), directed by Levi and recognized as teacher training by the Department of Education of the government of Catalonia.[15]
As a consequence of this project, in 2021 and at the request of the President of the European Parliament, Levi published for the Publications Office of the European Union the report "Proposal for a sovereign and democratic digitalisation of Europe".[16]
Proposal for a Democratic Digitalisation of Europe - European Parliament
Simona Levi and her Xnet team have been the subject of a documentary entitled "L'escletxa" directed by David Fernandez de Castro and produced by Bettina Walter in 2021. The documentary was produced by the Catalan public television as part of the documentary program "Sense Ficció".[17]
She participates as a speaker and expert at national and international events, where she talks about the Xnet project, and the state of free culture, digital rights and technopolitics. These events include the Ministerial Forum for Creative Europe (Czech Republic),[18]Transmediale (Berlin),[19] Economies of the Commons (Amsterdam)[20] and the seminar “Sustainable Economy Law and the Internet” organised by the Telecommunications Technical Engineering Faculty at the Technical University of Madrid. As a representative of the FCForum, she is a lobbyist at the European Commission. She has provided expert advice on democratic innovation and digital rights to institutions such as the Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence of Spain and the Directorate of Digital Society of the Government of Catalonia, as well as citizens' associations.
Political career
Simona Levi is one of the developers of X Party, an "anti-party" born from the 15M movement, founded on December 17, 2012, and active until 2015.[21][22] She held the number 2 position on the electoral list of X Party for the 2014 European elections, behind Hervé Falciani.[23]
Jordi Pujol Soley is a Catalan politician who was the leader of the party Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya (CDC) from 1974 to 2003, and President of the Generalitat de Catalunya from 1980 to 2003.
The Democratic Convergence of Catalonia, frequently shortened as Convergence was a Catalan nationalist, liberal political party in Catalonia (Spain), currently still existing without any political activity.
Rodrigo de Rato y Figaredo is a banker, politician and convicted felon who served in the Council of Ministers of Spain from 1996 to 2004. He also served as the ninth managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from 2004 to 2007 and the president of Bankia from 2010 to 2012.
Núria Espert Romero is a Spanish theatre and television actor, and theatre and opera director.
Simona Škrabec is a Slovene literary critic, essayist and translator who lives and works in Barcelona. She spent her childhood in the small town of Ribnica in the region of Lower Carniola. She has lived in Barcelona since 1992. Skrabec has translated several books from Slovenian to Catalan and from Catalan to Slovenian. In addition to these two languages, she is fluent in Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, German, English and French.
The Free Culture Forum (FCForum) was an international meeting of relevant organisations and individuals involved in free culture, digital rights and access to knowledge. It took place in Barcelona every annually from 2009 to 2015, jointly with the oXcars, a free culture festival. The oXcars are a non-competitive awards ceremony held at Sala Apolo in Barcelona, Spain, in October each year. They are a public showcase that puts the spotlight on cultural creation and distribution carried out under the paradigms of shared culture. Through presentations and symbolic mentions of works in a series of categories, real legal situations involving free culture are shown using parody.
Bankia was a Spanish financial services company that was formed in December 2010, consolidating the operations of seven regional savings banks, and was partially nationalized by the government of Spain in May 2012 due to the near-collapse of the institution. As of 2017, Bankia was the fourth largest bank in Spain, with total assets of €179.1 billion. In 2021, the bank merged with CaixaBank to create a new entity but preserved its original name.
¡Democracia Real YA!, also known as Plataforma Democracia Real Ya!, is a Spanish grassroots organization that started in March 2011 in Madrid, Spain. It sparked the political movement of May 15, 2011 (15M) whose protests gained worldwide attention. The protests been compared to the May 1968 social movement in France.
Xnet is a non-profit activist platform that develops and promotes alternative models for cultural dissemination and royalty management and work in different fields related to digital rights, networked democracy and freedom of expression. Its activities revolve around five core themes: free culture, Internet neutrality, technopolitics, network democracy, new models of sustainability for the digital era and the defence of citizen journalism and the legal fight against corruption. Xnet also engages in political lobbying at the national and international levels, by preparing and submitting legislative proposals and viral campaigns. Until 2023, Xnet was a member of European Digital Rights (EDRi), a not-for-profit association to promote, protect and uphold civil rights in the field of information and communication technology.
Barcelona en Comú is a political party launched initially as a grouping of electors in June 2014. Its policy agenda includes defending social justice and community rights, promoting participatory democracy, introducing mechanisms to tackle corruption, and developing a new model of tourism for Barcelona.
The X Party is a political party officially registered with the Spanish Ministry of Interior. The X Party registered towards the end of 2012, and appeared publicly at the beginning of 2013. It was the first party to be founded by a group of people connected to the 15M Movement and other free culture movements. The party supports a model of democracy that is participatory and monitored by everyday citizens, taking advantage of the political potential of tools available for digital communication.
The anti-austerity movement in Spain, also referred to as the 15-M Movement, and the Indignados Movement, was a series of protests, demonstrations, and occupations against austerity policies in Spain that began around the local and regional elections of 2011 and 2012. Beginning on 15 May 2011, many of the subsequent demonstrations spread through various social networks such as Real Democracy NOW and Youth Without a Future.
Ganemos or Guanyem refers to a set of independent municipal initiatives in Spain seeking to create and improve mechanisms for more direct citizen participation in politics. The movement, like 15M, was initiated during the Spanish financial crisis amidst a growing perception of, and disdain for, corruption, privatization, a closed nature of primaries, and political stagnancy caused by the two-party system. Ganemos is used for Spanish-speaking communities and Guanyem for Catalan-speaking communities.
Laura Borràs i Castanyer is a Catalan philologist, academic and politician from Spain who was the President of the Parliament of Catalonia until her suspension as member of the Parliament of Catalonia under allegations of corruption.
Rafael Spottorno Díaz-Caro, is a Spanish diplomat, Private Secretary to the King between 2011 and 2014. Since 2014, is involved in the corruption scandal named Tarjetas Black.
Daniel Blesa, better known by the stage name Supremme de Luxe, is a Spanish actor, singer, cabaret artist, drag queen and television personality based in Madrid.
Begoña Blasco is a former Spanish rhythmic gymnast. She won the bronze medal with ribbon at the World Championships in Madrid in 1975. That same year she became the first national champion of Spain.
María Jesús Alegre Etayo, also known as Chus Alegre, is a Spanish former rhythmic gymnast. She achieved, among other medals, the bronze in the general of the World Championship in Madrid in 1975, the first medal in an international competition for the Spanish national team and the only one in the individual All-Around of a World Championship to date. She won another three more medals in that World Cup and was also absolute champion of Spain in 1976 and 1977.
África Blesa is a Spanish former rhythmic gymnast. She was part of the first national rhythmic gymnastics team in Spain and participated in the World Championship in Madrid in 1975.
Ramón Espinar Gallego is a Spanish former politician. A member of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) politician, he was the mayor of Leganés in the Community of Madrid, and a member of the Assembly of Madrid from 1983 to 1995, serving as its president from 1983 to 1987. He was the regional minister of culture (1987–1991) and finance (1991–1995). In 1995, he was named an advisor at Caja Madrid, and was sentenced to one year in prison in 2017 for his involvement in a credit card scandal.
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