Simona Levi

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.

In 1999 she founded Compañia 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...) for more than two years. In 2003, again with Dominique Grandmougin, she directed the company’s second work, Seven Dust, which premièred at the 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.

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. Since 2008 she has managed 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 work staging 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 from 447 emails sent to and by the bank’s president Miguel Blesa. The work was 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 Rosalia 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 dramatization of data.

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 puts the spotlight on projects created in different arts disciplines based on the paradigm of free culture.

As a member of Xnet, she is director of the staging of the oXcars and also the 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. The work of this platform would seem to be of concern to the United States government. A cable from the US ambassador in Spain notes that “[…] these populist advocacy groups are very vocal”.

In 2010, she appeared before the European Union 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.”

In recent years, she has participated as a speaker and observer at national and international events, where she talks about the Xnet project, the situation of free culture, digital democracy, copyright management, and possible alternatives to the present model. These events include the Ministerial Forum for Creative Europe (The Czech Republic), Transmediale (Berlin), Economies of the Commons (Amsterdam) and the seminar “Sustainable Economy Law and the Internet” organized 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.

Simona Levi is a member of the 15M movement in Spain and 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 Caja Madrid–Bankia cronies), 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 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.

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. The Spanish branch of the Group was presented at the Free Culture Forum 2015 with the support of Xnet, 15MpaRato, David Fernàndez, former member of parliament for the political party CUP (Popular Unity Candidacy), and the Acción Cívica (Civic Action) platform, among others.

In 2015–2016, as a member of the Advisory Council of the Barcelona City Hall Office for Transparency and Best Practice, she initiated and worked to install the Ethical and Good Governance Box, a complaints box by means of which citizens can denounce corruption and other practices that are damaging for good governance in the city of Barcelona. 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.

Political career

Levi is one of the coordinators of X Party, a Spanish political party that emerged from the 15-M movement (Indignados movement)and was founded on 17 December 2012. She was second on the X Party ballot for the 2014 European Parliament elections, after the party’s first candidate Hervé Falciani.