Anti-system major festivals

The summer main festivals of the post-war era dance with sheetless ghosts. In the square, there is a human ration card. My grandmother Rosa Finestres Oliva was 18 years old in 1939: “You went to a main festival and a majority of pretty girls and a few young men, because many took a long time to come back from the concentration camps, from exile… It wasn't lively like before. That youthfulness wasn't there...” Main Festivals Intensive Care Units. Hospitals of the soul. No one wants to remember the nuclear explosion of the War. The first massive collective therapy. The catharsis of the pasodoble of forgetfulness. Binary rhythm to move forward. To bob not to drown. Dance, dance... to float. And the traditional, homemade, natural remedy, as always, worked.

The main festivals are the convertible of Catalonia. Ovule, carbon 14, km 0 of this country. Originals, unique, unrepeatable. Intergenerational, interclass, interterritorial, interemotional. The only thing that almost killed them was the hegemonic victory of the night with the birth of boîtes, pubs, discos. But isn't a night venue a main festival with a hood? Yes, revenge takes time and those who have ended up dying are the discos. The main festivals, like Terminator-I'll be back, are now empires, planets, galaxies of sidereal, total, infinite freedom, especially for young people. Today, many things can only be done, seen, heard, lived at the village main festivals. They are the great anti-system movement: because they are natural, real, true, Catalan. So it's not surprising that they want to murder them again.

This is not some bullshit about Gracia. This all-you-can-eat buffet of complaints from elitist minorities against the Gracia people. The radicalized voices of yo-yo-yo (the marketing of "Because I'm worth it - I'm not stupid") against the historic and living us of the main festival. Behind the demands to end activities in the streets, noises, nuisances, decoration, native organisms, or whatever – because there’s always something… there is the purchase of Barcelona. The privatization of freedom. The expropriation of existential streets, of spiritual cobblestones. Behind this simmering lethal vaccine probe of "relocation", 150 kilometers away, or in Upper Siberia, there is this utopian model of a non-Barcelona Robinson Crusoe superblock that is not Barcelonian. Translated it means: houses, streets, neighborhoods, bunkered districts, locked and barred, like rich residential areas from Latin American soap operas. They want the soul and the body. They want the occupation-management of what is not theirs nor have they ever built. They want it in Gràcia and they will want it town by town.

The major festivals still tell us that Catalonia is a country. That we are a material and spiritual confederation. That we are a homeland made of hours and days of freedom. Catalonia is in all the squares. The noise that bothers is this. What they don't want to see is this. They want a Barcelona and Catalonia fallen like that of 1939. And let the permanent curfew sound, sold as a placebo-light festival of Francoism brunch: “To the Lime and the Lemon, you have no one who loves you. To the Lime and the Lemon, you will remain single. What a pity and what pain. What a pity and what pain, the little neighbor opposite remained single. She remained single. To the Lime and the Lemon…” Without love. Without being able to say "I love you".