Banksy's leap into the void

1. Waterloo Place is a place where nothing ever happens. The gentlemen's clubs in the Pall Mall buildings turn the promenade under London's stately arcades into a landscape preserved from another era. Suddenly, however, this beautiful corner of Westminster has experienced an artistic upheaval that is also a pertinent global political critique. Banksy has installed one of his works which, instead of being a usual wall painting, is a sculpture with volume, with relief, and with a lot of depth. A man, in a tailored suit, blinded by his own flag, walks without realizing he will fall from the pedestal. The work is the perfect metaphor for the far-right's national priorities which, with America for Americans, Spain for Spaniards, and so on, is heading straight for a leap into the void. Wrapped in nationalist causes, with eyes covered by hatred and selfishness, it leads us all towards the cliff edge. A small step for a fascist, but a step of dire consequences for humanity.

2. Banksy's sculpture, installed in a single night, is a wake-up call to the world. It is brave, committed art that expresses the fears of the time in which it lives. It is a chestnut, as beautiful as it is well-delivered, to the patriotic blindness that is globally leading us to ruin. What the UN fails to do, stopping those who break international laws, those who start wars without cause, those who cannot finish them, those who kill civilian populations with drones, missiles, and bombs of all kinds, an artist tries to do with brilliant satire. Banksy describes the vertigo that Trump's MAGA entails. Or Jordan Bardella's France, which links the regularization of immigrants in Spain with crime and social degradation. Or, not going any further, the Spain of the Vox deputy who, in the Parliament of Catalonia, addressed Najat Driouech, a deputy from Esquerra, to tell her, “We will not deport her, for now.” I don't know if what comes before the comma is worse, or this “for now” that he added afterwards. I don't know if the threat in the sentence or the Islamophobia of deputy Tarradas, who apologized half-heartedly, chills me more. He, too, is now Banksy's sculpture.

3. Not long ago, one morning while Jordi Basté was interviewing filmmaker David Trueba, he asked him if he had already seen wokes, the separatists –, we must say no, that this is unfair, that not everyone should be attacked equally, because not all ideologies are equally harmful. And Trueba added that, laughing, it cannot be that the blunders of one and the other are equated. Not all are the same. It's not true. And he's right. Everyone can have contradictions, but the racism, homophobia, and sexism preached by the most rancid right, and which Torrente himself represents, are more censurable causes than others, even in comedy. Equidistance, also in art or in films of recalcitrant "cunyadisme", continues to be a deception. It is a refuge for the comfortable, who deep down do not dare to say what they think so as not to look too bad with anyone. After all, Trueba's phrase, which swayed between common sense and philosophy, would lead us to that liberal limit, expressed by a great thinker like Karl Popper: if you tolerate intolerant ideologies (which want to destroy rights and freedoms) you end up destroying tolerance itself. Because of this paradox, we are on the verge of going to hell.