Captain Swing has translated into Spanish the 15 years of work of journalist Toby Muse in Colombia reporting on drug trafficking. In Kilo: The Secret World of the Cocaine Cartels, this London-born reporter tries to recover – with the help of translator Victoria Pradilla – the English journalism of American authors from the 70s, such as Joan Didion, Michael Herr or Tom Wolfe.

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?