With a t-shirt that reads "Palestinians will be free" and two uppercase tattoos on his forearms that say "SILENCE IS COMPLICITY", the pharmaceutical group Ferrer businessman and patron of the Ferrer Foundations, Sergi Ferrer-Salat, presented this Friday with his kind anti-system vehemence an exceptional project in Barcelona: the only bookstore in the world dedicated to the Palestinian conflict and its ramifications. "The question shouldn't be why we are opening this bookstore, the question is why no one has opened it before —he begins—. The main reason is the lack of awareness of to what extent the cause of the Palestinian people condenses, like no other in terms of virulence, cruelty, cynicism, and dehumanization, the full contemporary validity of the fateful triangle of imperialcolonialism, capitalism, and racism that has led us to today's world, a world eaten away and devastated by an unsustainable and immoral degree of inequality and injustice.

Sergi Ferrer-Salat (Barcelona, 1968) directs one of the most important pharmaceutical businesses in the country and at the same time is fully dedicated to the world of culture. He wants to free it from commercial interests and expand it. The foundation he presides over has multiple projects related, above all, to music: for more than twenty years it has awarded the Reina Sofía prizes for musical creation; it collaborates with the Barcelona Jazz Festival, with a program of masterclasses by the great names of international jazz at the Liceu Conservatory; it awards the Ferrer-Salat Scholarships to young musicians, and with the Liceu and the Foundation of Parochial Schools of the Archdiocese of Barcelona, it has a music education program in Primary for social integration in disadvantaged environments. The musical projects of his foundation continue to grow. Recently, with the psychiatry and mental health department of Vall d'Hebron, he has promoted the Hip Hop Project In, which tries to help refugees who arrive in Catalonia and have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder with music.

Books of essays, in Catalan, Spanish, English, French, Galician... Welcome those who pass through the door of the new Finestres bookshop, which opens its doors this Thursday at number 249 Diputació street in Barcelona. The cataloguing is sui generis: melancholy, women with power, heretics, rebels and outcasts, everyday life... Further back is fiction, comfortable armchairs, old lamps, and a fireplace. The bookshop, if the works next door allow it, wants to be above all a space of silence, a place to read but not to work: there is no signal. Silence is not just a suggestion, it has to be obeyed: it is full of signs that light up if the tone of voice is too high.