Since 1992, Barcelona's leaders have presented the city as a vast Olympic village buried beneath the magma of some kind of volcano (with a crater in Montjuïc, I suppose), paralyzed and petrified by the success of Games held decades ago—excesses year after year, all under the banner of "managing success." Since then, the attempts to find an equivalent event or distraction for the city's residents have been varied: from the Forum of Cultures to the grandiose Winter Olympics, not to mention the extreme frivolity of the America's Cup or the Formula 1 exhibitions on Passeig de Gràcia. They've tried every possible approach, and none have succeeded: there's no way to deny that the biggest popular, massive, inspiring, civic, and unanimous event in Barcelona since 1992 was the referendum of October 1, 2017, and all the demonstrations that followed. This year, if they also intend to conceal this fact under the veil of a contrived and superficial Gaudí Year, it will backfire on them as well.
Gaudí would have been first in line at the polls; everyone knows that. And the first to let himself be beaten, if necessary. The messages we are receiving today from the Gaudí Year committee, or from the shameful acts in Reus making our Great Architect of the Universe speak in Spanish, point to a deliberate watering down of his Catalan nationalist militancy, irrepressible and even radical (as his gang called him), which profoundly explains all his architectural and symbolic work. It shouldn't surprise us: after the multiple attempts to anesthetize the population with events devoid of meaning or any kind of civic connection, their attempt to exploit the completion of the tower of Jesus Christ to sing hymns of fraternal harmony among all the peoples of Spain is a predictable script. God is love and forgiveness and extending a helping hand to one's neighbor, indeed and without question: but Gaudí, and beyond Gaudí, Modernism as a whole, is an artistic movement linked to an explicit Catalan nationalistic claim. This fact bothers the current municipal authorities, starting with the mayor, so much that they are even capable of trying to hide or distort it. It's fine: the "Freedoms"And protests can spring up everywhere, as happened in '92.
Barcelona deserves a city council that includes everyone, that is open and embraces urban and global diversity, but that never forgets the foundations of its most distinctive features: in Barcelona, what tells the story of the city is not the city's history. Tourists know this, the expados They know it, lifelong Barcelonans know it, but the municipal government prefers to manage this living stone as a mere pretty facade, a permanent Vicky Cristina Barcelona in which the people of Barcelona are mere extras and the visitors are limited to saying "wonderful, beautiful"without understanding the reasons for all of it. There is no Modernism without the memory of the Gothic, and there is no Gothic without allusion to the Catalan counties and lost freedoms. In Barcelona, you only have to visit these two things, Gothic and Modernisme, and neither of them is the Olympic Ring. Even less so in the "new Icarias" without juice, nor.
This Gaudí Year (also the year, by the way, in which Barcelona is World Capital of Architecture) should be about dignifying our most universal architect, and not about creating twisted narratives that try to borrow the political intentionality of his symbols, or about footprints around the ground. suddenly in X) under the ridiculous sign of "Spain". No: the Gaudí Year should be for the whole world, but unmistakably ours. Montaner: "Let them say that what we have done for Catalonia we have done for Spain, we have done for the civilized world and for the planetary system." "This victory belongs exclusively to Catalonia; we have won it against the political Spain that has always ignored it, ignored it until recently, and still ignores it."
