The magician from Ronda who performs with the Clowns Without Borders organisation

Lola Mento walks many paths. One of them is that of being a magician in a world of magic, in which she wonders whether she is hired to perform because she is good at her profession, or because she is a woman and hired to comply with a percentage of parity in order to be politically correct. Another path leads her to collaborate with the NGO Clowns Without Borders' to bring smiles to half the world. Lola also performs in children's hospitals with the Abracadabra foundation.

Another path (there are many more) is the professional one, strictly speaking, which she describes as "very hard" and in which she has fallen down and got up again and again. After years of hard work, this Jerez-born artist, who has settled in Ronda (her partner is the magician Luigi Ludus - Luis Granados - who is from Ronda), has recently received first prize in the category of 'related arts' at the 39th national magic congress, held in Terrassa. For this, she performed Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Bohemian Rhapsody, combining theatre, magic and music, and was the only woman to receive a solo award.

"The most beautiful thing is to feel the acceptance of the guild, that I am one more, that we are on the right path, that we are doing well: it has been difficult to continue along a path that has been very hard... It looks like my award, but this one is also Luigi's", said Mento, whose real name is Beatriz Garrido.

This number came to her during the pandemic, in confinement, and when she put it on stage she reaped more than one failure. She wanted to throw in the towel, but her partner encouraged her not to do so and supported her, "That's why I say that the prize is also his," said the artist, who hopes to travel to Morocco next October with Clowns Without Borders. She has already performed with this NGO in the Ivory Coast, Macedonia, Nicaragua, Palestine, Lebanon, Ethiopia, Colombia, Poland, Mexico and Indonesia, among other places.

Mento first started in the profession around 20 years ago, when, "in a complicated moment", she began to collaborate with the NGO and landed in Lebanon, in a conflict zone. It was in the refugee camps that she met a clown: "He told me that I had to differentiate between me as a person and my way of working, so I decided to call myself Lola Mento (making a play on words and he liked the name Lola). From that moment on, my work was going to be fun and was going to be making people laugh," she said. And so it was, because this multifaceted artist from Cadiz has not stopped working, with a long career that guarantees her participation in different festivals and events.

When she is not working, she says she likes "eating, travelling the countryside, going to the mountains, travelling with my NGO, spending time with Luigi, laughing and reading". "I love crime novels, I don't like watching TV. I only watch the news and First Date on TV.... Am I less interesting because I watch First Date? Well, I don't know, I don't care," she said, and added that, if she hadn't been a magician, she would have liked to work in social integration: "I've always said that I would have liked to be like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, to take kids who are going through a bad life and motivate them".