"One must become an international Catalan," Joan Miró used to say when he was heading to Paris in 1919, a few years before Ernest Hemingway acquired his painting The Farm (started in Mont-Roig and finished in Paris) winning it from a dealer by playing dice. The Dalinian version of this expansive purpose (once expelled from Madrid and familiarized with Paris) was his conquest of America, filling the world's imagination with rocks from Cap de Creus. And Picasso, also bored with Madrid, knew the Quatre Gats and the Universal Exhibition of Barcelona before the Chat Noir and the Paris Expo. The three could have deserved to baptize El Prat airport, if El Prat is indeed an insufficient name, but only Miró has a mural on the facade of Terminal 2 and only he intended, with this mural and with the sculpture Woman and Bird and the mosaic of the Pla de l'Ós on La Rambla, to welcome visitors arriving in the city by land, sea, or air.
Knowing this is already enough to consider it an absurdity to give the airport any other name than Joan Miró. Let's add that, of the three artists mentioned, he is the one with the most sky in his eyes (Picasso is too earthly and Dalí is not as angelic as he proclaims himself) and the one with the most popular identification with Mediterranean chromatics. Picasso serves to make the universal symbol of peace, Dalí serves to create a map of dreams, and Miró serves to look at the sky. You observe a Miró painting and you devour the blue, you understand the blue, you breathe the blue, you feel Duke Ellington's blues. I don't want to be a pictorial analyst; I just want to make clear the total sense it would make for the most international airport in this part of Europe to bear the name of a universal Catalan like him.
They say Dalí will already have the Sagrera station, looking towards Perpinyà, but I'm afraid I can't trust the promises of a city that has never dared to dedicate even a single street to him (unlike the other two painters) and that still has the works on this station unfinished (while it finishes trams along Diagonal that no one has ever voted for). We could do this, we could be open and universal, and at the same time evoke an art, a gaze, a cosmogony, as genuine and singular as it is aimed at breaking all limits. We could transform our airport into an icon, into an easily identifiable symbol, into a manifesto of intentions. We could do all this, or we could be provincial. Act provincially, I mean. Baptize the airport with a name that no one outside knows and that, inside, no one mentions. Look inward, but towards the smallest and most testimonial part of our inwardness. Furthermore, we could do it without any popular consultation or any negotiation between administrations, those dialogues that they talk so much about when they mention the great public-private and public-public and private-private collaboration during the longed-for Olympic Games: we could, in short, decree the name of Josep Tarradellas Airport. And indeed, citizens of Catalonia: it's already here.
I will only briefly mention the political considerations, which are quite obvious: the decree of the name change clearly, directly, and even obscenely obeys the need to make it clear to all Catalans of 2017 that the most they can aspire to is a conditioned autonomy like the one that was "agreed" in 1978: that is, to set the counter to zero. So much for the political consideration.
Now let's go to concepts that everyone can understand, no matter what they think: Charles de Gaulle, in Paris. John Lennon, in Liverpool (with "above us only sky" as a motto). Ferenc Liszt, in Budapest. Simón Bolívar, in Caracas. Konrad Adenauer, in Cologne/Bonn. Cristiano Ronaldo, in Madeira. José Joaquín de Olmedo, in Guayaquil. José Martí, in Havana. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, in New York. Cuatro de Fevereiro, in Angola. Jorge Chávez, in Lima. José María Córdova, in Medellín. Ástor Piazzolla, in Buenos Aires. Augusto César Sandino, in Managua. Benito Juárez, in Mexico City. Josef Strauss, in Munich. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, in Montreal. Jean Lesage, in Quebec. Kigsford Smith, in Sydney. Marco Polo, in Venice.
Josep Tarradellas, in Barcelona. I have no further questions, Your Honor.