When he was invited to create a mural at the Joan Miró Foundation in 2010, the American illustrator Brian Rea was working full-time as an art director for the opinion section of the New York Times, a stressful job that caused him a lot of anxiety. A compulsive list-maker, Rea had started writing down in his diary all the things that caused him stress with the goal of reducing his anxiety. The list grew and grew until Rea had the idea of turning it into one of the murals to paint at the Joan Miró Foundation, the piece Fears. “It was a wall of words, and I remember how the public looked at it and how they reacted,” explains Rea. “People crying, people laughing, people pointing at parts of it. As an illustrator, you don't have much contact with your audience. Yes, someone would tell me once in a while that they liked a drawing of mine, and that was it. So seeing people's reactions in real time was very important to me. But, at the end of the day, it was a text-based work, and I decided to work on achieving that level of emotional resonance in my visual works.”

Just the year of the Barcelona Olympic Games, Maria Vidal's parents decided to leave the capital and move to Cardedeu, in the Vallès Oriental. The argument to convince the children was that they could get around by bicycle. “They bought one for each of us – she recalls–. We went by bike to high school, to visit friends... We moved around without depending on anyone.” Two decades later, Cardedeu laid the groundwork for many more children, like Maria at the time, to go by bicycle: it connected the five schools with different sections of cycle lanes, so that everyone could get there by pedaling from home.

"Freedom is incompatible with democracy"It seemed like a joke from the Trumpian universe, designed to create noise and legitimize the president's nihilism and the conviction of the oligarchs who surround him that, for them, there are no limits: they can get away with anything. But the idea is spreading with a disturbing contagion effect, as if it were meant to be the new economic, social, and communicational one.

Illustrator Amaia Arrazola has died at the age of 41 in Barcelona, the city where the Basque artist settled years ago and where she developed her professional career. Arrazola was one of the most prominent illustrators of her generation, known for books such as her tribute to the universe of Hayao Miyazaki. Totoro and I (Lunwerg, 2022) or the first-person testimony about the impact of motherhood The meteorite (Lunwerg, 2020), as well as for the murals she painted in Japan, Madrid, Timisoara, Rabat, and Barcelona, where she covered the 86 meters of the fence of the Abacería Market in the Gràcia neighborhood.

When she was little, the Italian illustrator Beatrice Alemagna used to compete with her sister to see who could draw the prettiest picture. This kind of sibling contest was her father's idea, who years later admitted it might not have been his best. Although it might seem a questionable approach, it was also true that it planted the seed for his daughter Beatrice's career. When she was eight, the family went to Paris. My father chose the Eiffel Tower as the subject: whoever drew the best picture would win a Corolle doll, which I imagine was a kind of Nancy doll of my time. Alemagna wanted to win and studied the tower intently. That night, her father decided the doll was for her sister, and she cried in despair. However, at that moment, she promised herself that one day she would draw a beautiful Eiffel Tower and publish it in a book. Not only did she keep that promise, but today she is one of the most recognized and admired illustrators in the world, whose work in Catalan can be found published primarily by Combel and A Buen Paso.

Is Trump killing democracy? Are we witnessing a crime in real time? In a few decades, will we need a historian Carles Porta to elucidate the dark plot? Are we still in time to avoid the tragic death? Let us shed light on the darkness. And what better light than that projected by Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu and company three hundred years ago, during the Age of Enlightenment, when they taught us the joy of reasoning, thinking and feeling freely, when they instilled in us confidence in progress and science.