I saw the poster for Barcelona's main festival, La Mercè 2025, from my laptop in the Boí Valley, where we've spent August for a quarter of a century. I point this out to contextualize what I'm about to explain next. After breakfast, we went for a coffee in Erill la Vall—on foot, naturally; we've never owned a car. The path that runs along the Noguera de Tor has shady areas with ash and hazel trees, and large sunny areas where oregano grows among the ferruginous stone. Upon reaching the small town center, the bell tower rises imposingly yet weightlessly. It's slender, luminous, elemental in the best sense of the word. I've never tired of admiring it. From the terrace of the bar where we were, the morning sun gave it a timeless appearance. I think of it, evoking the poster for La Mercè 2025 that I had looked at a couple of hours earlier on my laptop. It represents everything opposite to this building. The poster image depicts a dark, artificial, decadent world: the dying light of a Weimar Republic cabaret. It must be said that in an appropriate context—a play, for example—it would be a very beautiful and evocative image. It unmistakably recalls the production that the stage designer and activist queer Thomas Jolly performed the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games last year. Regarding the aforementioned poster, Lluís Danés, the author, states on the Barcelona City Council website"When I was commissioned to create the poster for the 2025 Mercè, I understood that they weren't just asking me for an image. They were asking me for a story, an emotion, an invitation to dream together." The statement is more significant than it seems. What is this story? What emotion are we talking about? Are these shared references, or is the invitation to dream together actually addressed to a small minority?
Following the opening of the Paris Olympic Games, several prestigious intellectuals publicly demanded explanations from those responsible for the event. They were neither far-right nor had anything to do with defending Christianity; on the contrary. The most vehement of all was precisely a recalcitrant atheist and libertarian socialist, the philosopher Michel Onfray"This parade shows that today there are two Frances: that of the Parisian elites and that of the rural areas condemned to oblivion, abandoned, where misery reigns. The spectacle of the opening of the Games replaces the real with the virtual, the tragic with the playful, to build a Disneyland. woke and kitschThese are, according to Onfray, the contradictions of an elite that has appropriated the arts through promiscuity with power. Communist, and now backing Marine Le Pen. What Onfray described a year ago was merely a one-off battle within the context of a much broader cultural war. Not only is it not about the Christian religion (this is the clichéd interpretation), but also about the simulation of a cultural polarization that, in reality, doesn't exist. It's about another reality. Some choose to ignore them, while others rigorously analyze the causes. A recent example, in this very newspaper: the excellent article by Professor Jordi MuñozWhat about young men?", referring to an issue that, indirectly, has a lot to do with the one we are raising."
As I write this article, representatives of the majority of humanity and their ever-growing allies are heading in the opposite direction to the depressing gloom of the Merced 2025 poster or the slow, sad characters at the Paris 2024 Olympics ceremony. The world of Putin, Modi, and Xi Jinping—not this Europe—doesn't exactly strike me as a stimulating alternative, because it has nothing to do with emancipatory or progressive projects. Perhaps I'm not the only one who sees it this way.
