Sergi Ferrer-Salat, the businessman who wants to free music and books from the market

BarcelonaSergi Ferrer-Salat (Barcelona, 1968) directs one of the most important pharmaceutical businesses in the country and at the same time is fully dedicated to the world of culture. He wants to free it from commercial interests and expand it. The foundation he presides over has multiple projects related, above all, to music: for more than twenty years it has awarded the Reina Sofía prizes for musical creation; it collaborates with the Barcelona Jazz Festival, with a program of masterclasses by the great names of international jazz at the Liceu Conservatory; it awards the Ferrer-Salat Scholarships to young musicians, and with the Liceu and the Foundation of Parochial Schools of the Archdiocese of Barcelona, it has a music education program in Primary for social integration in disadvantaged environments. The musical projects of his foundation continue to grow. Recently, with the psychiatry and mental health department of Vall d'Hebron, he has promoted the Hip Hop Project In, which tries to help refugees who arrive in Catalonia and have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder with music.

Soon, at the end of February 2021, a new adventure related to the world of books will begin: the Finestres bookstore, which will have two premises opposite each other at numbers 249 and 250 of Barcelona's Diputació street. The new bookstore will also promote four literary awards and scholarships that will annually distribute 90,000 euros to novelists and researchers. Ferrer-Salat has very clear ideas and when he talks about culture, especially music, he gets enthusiastic. The bookstore, he explains, wants to be a space for reading: "I want you to be able to sit in any corner and spend hours reading, so that the perfect symbiosis is created between the reader and the book buyer." The awards and scholarships that will be granted aim to "empower" writers. Thus, for example, the "Finestres Narrative Award" will give prominence to works that may have gone unnoticed: "We want to give a second chance to already published works, so that whoever wants to be a writer can be so beyond commercial interests," says Ferrer-Salat. The businessman and patron explains that many books have marked his life and made him aware of many things and, in some cases, have marked a before and after. "Reading has helped me become aware of the world I live in and to act.

Ferrer-Salat is fully convinced of the transformative power of culture: "I have always believed that the objective of philanthropy and patronage is to eradicate the need for charity. Culture and music can empower citizens." For the businessman, there is nothing as satisfying as seeing how the grants awarded have "transformed lives": "I appeal to emotion, to having a direct relationship with people and to closely witnessing how their lives have changed through culture; I believe that is the best incentive." Culture, according to Ferrer-Salat, has great unifying power: "Deeply unequal societies are disastrous, and there is no region where this is as paradigmatic as Latin America, where there is a great lack of security, a lot of violence, and populisms triumph –reflects the businessman–. Culture helps to create more egalitarian societies, and if you only think about your own self-interest and believe that extreme inequalities will not affect you, it is because you are ignoring many things, because you will end up living in a gilded cage".