The Jardins de les Tres Xemeneies open up a huge gap at the end of Paralelo where the avenue rehearses its agony towards the port on an oceanic esplanade of concrete that graffiti artists have turned into one of Barcelona's most original corners. It's Tuesday mid-morning, rapper Pablo Hasél has just been arrested, and in the square of the gardens, between Pasaje de la Canadenca and Calle de Palaudàries, there's only a group of skaters doing pirouettes, some homeless person drinking warm beer, and a group of three urban artist apprentices observing a photo of the emeritus king while rehearsing gestures on a wall, imagining the caricature. The striking colors of the paint happily coexist with the red brick of engineer Narcís Xifra's chimneys, which rise like a family of Samothracians recalling the industrial and protest past of a city that when it really went on strike didn't burn four containers, but left everyone in the dark and scared at gunpoint.
On February 7, a group of artists from the city decided to appropriate part of the square to denounce Hasél's legal kidnapping. Owen has reserved the side wall of the square where we read a huge "Libertad de Expresión" (Freedom of Expression) in white letters on a black background. The motto is repeated, flipped as in a mirror, in Chamo's work which portrays the emeritus king crowned behind bars with a clown face. The exiled Bourbon is the undisputed star of the exhibition: Rughy draws him wielding a pistol while smoking a joint, with elephant tattoos on his biceps, a Gucci brand tank top, and some lyrics that read the verse Neither God can Judge Me. Contravening the traditional rules of the genre, most graffiti artists shun anonymity and sign their pieces (many include their Instagram link in a corner) with a certain playful intent. On Galeta Maria's account, in a photograph where she is seen painting masked, I can read: "we've done a little wall, bravas, and convoy coffees."
This is a square that perfectly symbolizes how, in this Barcelona of ours in the sad twenties, even protest will end up being institutionalized and framed in the cool-guay philosophy of the Colauist "getting by." The fact that municipal services cleaned one of the images of the Bourbon made by the artist Roc BlackBock (in which Juan Carlos I's face could be seen with some republican arrows stuck in his cheeks and accompanied by adjectives like "Thief" or "elephant murderer") and that afterwards the mayor of Barcelona hastily promised to restore it demonstrates to what extent this garden brings together artistic samples that are perfectly acceptable to the common citizen. This also explains why, with enormous cynicism, most Spanish Podemos politicians cry over Hasél's arrest on Twitter when it would be much easier for them to set his immediate pardon and the withdrawal of the Gag Law as a political condition to remain in the state government.
It is of enormous cynicism that most Spanish Podemos politicians cry over Hasél's arrest on TwitterThe subsequent urban struggle we have experienced in Barcelona since the rapper's arrest (with burning containers as almost the sole protagonists of the art gallery) also falls into the same paradigm of institutionalized protest that we already experienced in the case of the airport occupation by Tsunami Democràtic. The new popular Barcelona revolutions, as already happened in that case, are manifas with a curfew, demonstrations of collective anger that are perfectly digestible by the state and that end when the last ferrocata leaves for Sant Cugatand you'll let us know where we're meeting tomorrow, folks. The grandmothers will be scandalized because the Eixample once again has four flares on the corner and the pundits will unpack their usual arguments to talk about order and/or revolution while we get used to the Catalan police mutilating a fellow citizen without anyone taking responsibility, because this country lives happily without a government.
As I wander through the garden towards Calle de Vilà i Vilà, I wonder why graffiti artists continue with this comfortable habit of picking on the emeritus and no one opts for the more difficult task of portraying the normalized state of exception that governs us. I'm not saying that the impunity of the monarchy shouldn't be denounced, which is even more insulting if we compare it to the act of imprisoning someone for the lyrics of a song, but the real problem of it all is not that the king goes off with prostitutes to the Emirates or retires like a pasha, but that feeling of normality (ugh) with which the exception is already a routine part of our lives and which is expressed in our leaders not taking responsibility for anything. To the eyes (and half a testicle) that were lost at the airport, in yet another deception by the procesistas, now another one-eyed heroine is added to whom no one will do justice. Neither Major Trapero, nor the Minister of Interior, nor the presidential candidate Aragonés: ours is a government without faces, without a single face.
Walking through the Tres Xemeneies park is a pleasure, no doubt. And that is precisely what worries me, that protest has become just another leisure activity in this city where the fairy Ada will end up institutionalizing even the art of peeing in a corner when you come back drunk from the bar, where indignation will increasingly resemble an episode of Polonia with its subsidized masks. For now, the fire of Pablo Hasél will be easily controlled by most administrations that fill newspapers with statements defending freedom of expression but also assuming that judges are obeyed and reminding that the boy in question was not an angel either. I would say that, in this very parsimonious environment, our only task will be to try to weave spaces of individual freedom that do not fall into the net of state-controlled protest nor into this thing of making graffiti because Chinese tourists end up being portrayed. This is the struggle of our time. To return the original flame to the Rose of Fire and for smoke to come out of the chimneys again.
Add The New Barcelona Post as your preferred Google source for free
Stay informed with the latest news.