Jaume Plensa: "I invite you to dream of Barcelona."

BarcelonaIt was a long time since Jaume Plensa lamented that he was loved more around the world than in Barcelona. Acceptance of the Gold Medal for Cultural Merit, the highest cultural award given by Barcelona City Council, spoke of his origins. "In those distant times, babies like me arrived from Paris flying over the Pyrenees. An ancestor of Pilsen in Algerri. We both looked for the south," said Plensa, who recalled how the large sculptures he has installed all over the world, from New York to Tokyo, via London, Madrid, Chicago, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Boston, Liverpool, Bonn, Mel by "bridges and invisible links."

As Plensa entered the Saló de Cent accompanied by the mayor, Jaume Collboni, both escorted by two city guards in full dress uniform, Plaça Sant Jaume began to fill with those attending the demonstration. Plensa has not spoken about it explicitly, but he has said that "our society lives anonymously with poverty, hunger, violence or pain, wars and more wars, collective displacement, the destruction of nature, misinformation" that I firmly believe that at the present time art, more than risking ourselves with all our hearts in collaboration with all social agents to find the certainty that allows us to define a new perception of common spaces, which will help us crystallize society's intense desire to fill darkness with light and everyday life with beauty."

A broad representation of the world

The event was attended by numerous political representatives, including Josep Rull, Speaker of the Parliament; Sonia Hernández Almodóvar, Regional Minister of Culture; Lourdes Borrell, Mayor of Sant Feliu de Llobregat, where Plensa has his studio; and Joan Basagañas, Mayor of Sant Just Desvern, where the artist lives with his wife and right-hand woman, Laura Medina. From the arts, the sculptor was accompanied by Elvira Dyangani Ose, Director of the MACBA, and Imma Prieto, Director of the Museu Tàpies. Also present were Rosa Maria Malet, former Director of the Joan Miró Foundation, where Plensa held one of his first major exhibitions; Carlos Taché, one of his first gallery owners; and fellow gallery owner Carlos Duran, who now represents him in Barcelona; Sara Puig, President of the Joan Miró Foundation; and Daniel Giralt-Miracle, critic. Llucià Homs, co-founder of the Loop video art festival and the Talking Galleries symposium, and the parish priest of the UPC, Daniel Crespo. And the music section was attended by two senior officials from the Liceu, whose doors are made by Plensa: the president, Salvador Alemany, and the general director, Valentí Oviedo. The commentary was given by writer Monika Zgustová, who revealed the impact the sculptor's work had on her: "Thanks to Jaume Plensa, I finally understood that each person is not only unique, but sacred," she said.

Plensa recalled how an old miner from the mining town of St. Helens, where he was installing one of his monumental heads, told him that inside the shaft the light is a "dream", so this afternoon he ventured that perhaps the light of Barcelona "can fill this darkness and bring beauty to people's daily lives, for being the welcoming, pioneering, brave, and silent city that we love and it is a mixed space, a magical and elevated city to which we would always want to return." "I invite you today to dream it. I invite you to look at the light," he concluded.

A negotiation like a love story

As Collboni recalled in the opening speech, Plensa received the Gold Medal with the unanimous approval of all municipal groups. "Plensa's art is essential, marked by the desire to cross the boundaries of reality and enter the spiritual realm. An art that brings us face to face with ourselves, that places us before the mirror in which cities expose themselves," said Collboni, who emphasized the call to introspection in his monumental works. "An art that asks us for silence, as his sculpture does." Water's soul on the banks of the Hudson River, just across from Manhattan. A silence, as Jaume Plensa himself says, against all the echoes and all the noise that sometimes makes us not know if we are speaking with our own ideas or with those of others," the mayor added.

Collboni also explained that, in his previous term as Deputy Mayor for Culture, he mobilized Carmela in front of the Palau de la Música to move to another city. Not only did he succeed, but the sculptor loaned it to the museum for another eight years. In fact, he considers that moment to have marked a turning point in the artist's relationship with his hometown. "What was supposed to start as a negotiation ended up being how to tell a love story between sculpture and the neighborhood of Sant Pere, Santa Caterina, and Ribera, between sculpture, the people of Barcelona, and the city," the mayor explained.