The day everything happened, Nacho A. Villar was at work and they called him from Human Resources. He thought “damn, that’s it.” They sat him down, looked at him with a serious expression and did not say goodbye. His girlfriend had been admitted urgently. Very bad prognosis. “We had been talking half an hour before, I couldn’t believe it,” he recalls in conversation with elDiario.es. Ana Isabel García Llorente, Gata Cattana, died hours later. It was March 2, 2017. The cause of death, sudden, was due to an anaphylactic reaction. He was 25 years old.
From that moment on, the life of Villar and all those who knew her was marked. Ana for them, and Gata for the world, was not yet famous. Fame, like many, came to him posthumously, quickly. Then she was recognized in the circuits underground Madrid and Andalusians. He had released two LPs: The seven against Thebes (2012), -which marked the beginning of his musical career mixing literary and cultural influences with trap- and Anchors (2015) -which included topics such as Lysitrata either The daggers and that made her a pioneer of the last feminist wave years before its outbreak. Ana, Gata, was about to publish a new work: Banzai (2017). He was going to record the video for his song of the same name that same weekend, but he didn’t have time. Days before he had given his first concert at the El Sol hall in Madrid.
“I had everything ready, the girl, and it couldn’t be. I remember talking to his friends and wondering what we were going to do with his posthumous work. Should we keep it to ourselves or release it to the world? What would she have wanted?” Her mother, also Ana, tells this newspaper. They published it, of course, and its success has been exponential. The album accumulates around 7 million views on Spotify and, on YouTube, the songs from the album and related videos add up to between 3 and 5 million views (depending on how the different official and unofficial publications are counted). For many, Banzai It is one of the most important albums of rap in Spanish.
Ana, Gata, suddenly interrupted herself in her twenties as soon as she finished what would be her greatest work. Like Cecilia, young and promising, what took her away was an accident. Different, but accident. Like Cecilia, who sang about gender violence in her bouquet of violets and emanated politics in her living Spain, her dead Spain, Ana Isabel García Llorente carried feminism and protest deep within her and similar tragedy ended up converting her. in a kind of millennial Cecilia.
“I am amazed that her music has continued to grow even when she is no longer here,” continues her mother, “there are still people who discover it and write it because of a collaboration. People who don’t know she’s gone,” she adds excitedly.
A life of high political tension
Nacho A. Villar says that he met the woman with whom he would share his life for almost two years in his own home. “I was recording music in the living room with my roommate. That afternoon we talked about politics for hours,” he recalls. Ana Isabel Llorente, Gata Cattana, had studied Political Sciences in Granada and all her work has a high voltage of sociopolitical analysis. “When they asked her where she got her lyrics from, or where her inspiration came from, she responded that with one news program she had enough material for an album,” says the mother with a smile.
Juancho Marqués, rapper and close friend of the artist, recalled last December 9 at the presentation of the reissue of the collection of poems by the Andalusian poet and rapper –complete poetry (Aguilar, 2024) -, that ‘La Gata’ could spend hours talking about the conflict in Syria and the Middle East. Also about feminism. “She was an example for the men and women of the rap world. In a masculinized environment where all the girls who wanted to enter played the same game, Gata Cattana stood out. She did not masculinize herself, it was she herself who, with a talent that amazed us all, showed us what was being done wrong. And that there was another way,” explained Marqués.
Something that many of her close friends agree on: “She led by example, she pointed out the sexist traits that you could have from your colleagues, from affection. She would sarcastically tell you ‘but you saw yourself!’, and you would go home thinking that, damn, Ana was right,” her friends point out.
She was an example for the men and women of the rap world. In a masculinized environment it was not masculinized. He showed us what was being done wrong. And there was another way
Juancho Marqués
— rapper
Like many artists, when she died young, promising, unexpected, her fame increased almost instantly. The press focused on it. Many people began to listen to him suddenly and his lyrics tirelessly take up banners at feminist demonstrations year after year.
Much of its “live” content is compiled in YouTube videos of dubious quality, pixelated, shaky, recorded by colleagues and acquaintances in a casual manner, as a typical memory that one leaves forgotten in a corner of a phone’s memory. old so as not to return to them. What they did not know then is that these recordings, most of them poetry readings at open microphones, would help freeze in time the image of a poet with enormous and inquisitive green eyes. His video reciting How the poor love on YouTube it has more than 300,000 views to date.
The Andalusian context
Born and raised in Adamuz, a town that she outgrew until the end of her life, where she had returned to look at her roots, Ana Isabel Llorente from Córdoba represented a generation full of talent and marked by forced migration. “She represents Andalusian popular culture very well,” explains Juanma Sayalonga, a friend of the artist and director of the documentary about her figure. Eternal (2023), which can be seen on the Filmin platform. “She lived in a time in which artists and creators in Andalusia had enormous cultural precariousness and which we continue to endure today,” she continues, adding that it was something that spoke to her a lot. “It was a generation also marked by the lack of investment in education and employment,” he says.
Sayalonga met her when they were both teenagers through Terra’s chat. “We became very good friends and although at times we lost contact when we were adults, I was always clear that I was in front of a genius,” he says. For him, and for all those interviewed, she was avant-garde, ahead of her time, a woman and an artist who broke stereotypes.
“Making the documentary has been a very emotional journey, it has brought together many of us who knew her and we have seen her figure grow as we filmed,” he explains. “There are many Anas, as many as there are people who knew her, but there is only one Gata Cattana,” Villar adds when remembering the figure of his partner.
The documentary, which traces the life of Ana Isabel Llorente before becoming Gata Cattana, takes the viewer to the world of flamenco, to the interests of a young woman who began as a singer and ended up as a rapper known throughout the national territory. “There’s something that she and I talked about at a time when, perhaps, I was a little crazy,” says the graffiti artist and illustrator, Don Iwana, from the screen, “I told her, Ana, auntie, people like us have overcome and death. If anything happens to us, we have already made history. Now, what we can do is improve the footprint. We have the trace, but people have not realized it yet,” he continues to conclude that now he is not only sure of those words, but he has proof. With her big eyes and sharp verb like a millennial Cecilia, Gata Cattana’s career was interrupted very soon, but her legacy has not stopped growing.
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