"Toads and governments have the Rambla clogged with large clumps of tourists who don't let us pass"

BarcelonaIf you arrive at the Ateneu Barcelonès and a big head with the wrinkled face of Josep Carner greets you, it is the unequivocal sign that only good, different, and exciting things can happen that evening. "Today we will let ourselves be guided by the most important and one of the most underestimated institutions of our lives: chance," proclaimed the poet and rapper Oriol Sauleda at the beginning of the show L'arrel quadrada, a heterogeneous collage of artistic actions that included readings by Enric Casasses, Maria Sevilla, and Júlia Bacardit, a fencing duel between modernists and noucentists, sonic actions by Xavi Lloses, and even a small session of choral gymnastics to the rhythm of a violinist from the Riba Orchestra.

Sauleda served as master of ceremonies for a fun and meaningful bingo game lasting almost two hours in the middle of the heatwave, a week after Biel Mesquida inaugurated the Juliols a la Fresca cycle. "If there are landlords in the room, consider yourselves addressed, I would tell you Jacint Verdaguer – proclaimed Maria Sevilla after reciting Caritat, a poem that the author of Canigó wrote in 1885–. Verdaguer had the guts to become too involved with the poverty of Barcelona, a city that if we think about it now, it is inevitable to refer to the housing crisis".

Each number that Sauleda sang from the pond in the romantic garden, with rabbit ears on his head and rubber boots on his feet to avoid slipping, invoked one of the participants. Architect Benedetta Tagliabue walked around with a model of the Santa Caterina market renovation while defending the transition "from a closed and walled city to an open city, with many trees and full of light". This praise contrasted with the proclamation "Soy una zorra de postal" repeated by a member of the Arcoiris association shortly after the participation of Enric Casasses, who recited a love poem set in present-day Barcelona and one that proposed a journey "to the end of Franco's years and the beginning of the transaction [sic]". If at that time a "total social revolution, not political", made from the Rambla, which was "the main street of home", was believed possible, in 2010, the year the poem was written, things had changed: "cops and governments have the Rambla blocked with large clumps of tourists who do not let us pass".

A neighborhood with many layers

Júlia Bacardit read a fragment from the book El Raval a deshora (Núvol, 2024). "El Raval is a place of sun, but it has many layers", she began, before recalling that in the neighborhood there is "drug, noise, dirt, high and low intensity harassment, and insomnia", a place where "everyone has a license to shout". Also to shine, with the biting irony of Remi Fa, the French singer-songwriter based in Barcelona who froze part of the audience's smiles: "We are the tourists who speak Catalan / 1 percent of all the Costa Brava".

Shortly before eight people in the audience played bingo, Enric Casasses recalled that until "the graffiti is painted on it, a house is not finished", and Maria Sevilla invoked Mercè Rodoreda from El carrer de les Camèlies and the Kentucky bar from one of her poems: "It's not early morning if I don't end up at Kentucky, begging for a drink".

The show continued for a while longer, with the reincarnation – for five minutes – of an Ildefons Cerdà angry with all the modifications to his plan. On behalf of the Arrels Foundation, Sergi Mejías also took the stage, who went from being "a wealthy person to having nothing because of alcohol and having to live on the street". "When you see someone like me on the street, you think I'm just one more, but before ending up like this I had a life like yours – he said –. And every time, unfortunately, there are more people like me, in Barcelona".