The Mercè poster

One of the great skills of the current Barcelona administration consists of having endowed with symbolic weight some rituals, habits, places or objects of the city that until recently passed as a mere anecdote, now converted into an erogenous zone of the urban public debate. This has happened with the Christmas nativity scene in Plaza Sant Jaume (which Ada Colau has turned into a volcano of postmodern remodeling of heteropatriarchal and religious roles) and also with the poster of La Mercè, which the socialists conceived as a simple postcard of extra pay for artists of their political ilk and which Colau, with her communicative genius, has reconverted into an emblem of the new common progressivism. The casting of the artists is handled by Nacho Padilla, the artistic director of the City Council from Madrid, one of the most important policy makers (ugh) of Colauism in its conscious dependence on image.

This year's big prize went to the Basque illustrator David de las Heras, a magnificent creator trained at the Escola Massana, who has woven a truly beautiful fresco with three Mercès of different generations amicably embracing around some flowers, some doves, and a couple of well-identifiable icons of the city. Given that the administration always assumes we are somewhat dim-witted, the City Council has given us the hermeneutics. On its website we read: "Which Mercè does the artist represent for us? Well, a Mercè that ties lives and, as if she were an expert tailor, sews generations of Barcelona residents. And it is that, if you look at the image of this year's poster, you may see a mother, a daughter, and a granddaughter, all three captivated in the contemplation of one of the many activities of the festival. Or perhaps you will see the same Barcelona woman who experiences the festival as a child, an adult, and an elderly woman."

The focusing of the gaze on a specific space in a work of art is one of the most political facts that emerge from it. Indeed, the illustration in question forces us to focus on the eyes of the youngest Mercè (the only person who looks at us directly, with an intentionally challenging sweetness), and from there we advance in the inexorability of time; first with the mother and then the grandmother. It is no coincidence, of course, the notoriously androgynous characterization of this first member of the trio, a paradigm of a later feminization that will be reached by one's own will, not by natural/divine imposition. This is, then, a festival where there is no more phallic representation than the unbearable towers of the Sagrada Família, dwarfed next to the poster; Mercè, and who knows if Barcelona, is a story of women alone looking to the future by choosing a gender that engenders.

There is also politics in what remains on the margins of the central gaze, and it is notorious to observe how, in the poster by de las Heras, Gaudí's work and an image of some castellers are relegated to the bottom of the photograph. All symbols of Catalan identity, therefore, appear folklorically subsumed to a superior struggle; that of three women who, I insist, experience the festival with the power of having acquired their gender meditatively in a space where men have nothing to do. National emancipation, or the spiritual presence of the tribe, is far from what the corny would call the real problems of the people. The engine that moves the world, in short, is the existing connection between this holy trinity of women; it is also no coincidence that the illustration generates a visual trick where the hands of these goddesses end up joining in the belly of the small future engendering Mercès.

As you can see, and art will play a fundamental role in all this, from now until the elections we await a political birth overloaded with symbolism that will increase in intensity. Art historians, dime-a-dozen hermeneutists and culture critics; prepare for the visual overload of the next political year. For the moment, at least, the level is high. And the poster is very beautiful.