The first thing that surprises about the exhibition 100 Ikea objects we would have liked to have at Vinçon is the agglomeration of fellow citizens gathered before a selection of the arch-famous bags from the ancestral store on Paseo de Gracia, contemplating them open-mouthed as if they were before the Victoria of Samothrace itself. During my visit to the DHUB, I confess that I paid very little attention to the contents of this exhibition (we already have the internet to look at so many panels and graphics), since I was much more attracted to savoring the joyfully sorrowful spirit of its visitors, a group of elderly Barcelonians who had rushed to the Glòries staple to indulge in the practice of our favorite national sport; nostalgia. But it also captured the undisguised middle-class pride of those who could spend their salary at Vinçon and maintain a reasonable enough retirement to help children and grandchildren furnish their small apartment with Ikea furniture.
No matter how much the curator Juli Capella makes very laudable efforts to connect the universes of Ikea and Vinçon (in interesting aspects such as the importance of naming, the promotion of local artists, or a sense of humor) and beyond the abysmal distance between the geographical reach of each business, the hard core of the schism between the two inventions lies in an aspect of pure class. Unlike Ikea, Vinçon was not a discovery of a democratizing spirit; to put it more crudely, as many people could enter the temple on Paseo de Gràcia as in a Swedish warehouse, among them many people took America Sanchez's calendar home, but we kept the teca in the Eixample. While Ikea brilliantly excited the idea of an independent domestic republic (with objects of infinite reproducibility), the grace of Vinçon was that everyone looked at the sofa but we had it at home.
In fact, the macabre irony of this exhibition ---appropriately coordinated with the Amat family--- is that, deep down, Vinçon would not have enjoyed stealing any product from the privileged skulls of Ikea, because (despite sharing a spirit of industrial, practical, and artistic design at the same time) the business key was the receptacle itself and the aura it gave you after buying, strolling peacefully through the Grid. The fellow citizens who gather before this multicolored salad of bags perpetrate a sentimental homage to the Barcelona of well-being, from when you could order your wedding list at Vinçon and knew that the tableware in question would last thirty years (because Catalans, that we do have, we are not people who throw plates at each other's heads). Those of us who have been pushed to break into Ikea have only been able to admire the skill the Swedes have in making us forget that we no longer have as much money or open bar as our parents.
Ikea has survived Vinçon not because it has greater skill in design, but because it has managed to democratize a false sense of well-being at highly reasonable prices. The mythical store in Barcelona ceased to exist because, despite still having good enough taste to admire the Amat's objects, Barcelonians no longer had enough money to afford them. In this sense, Vinçon closed its doors precisely because of its ambition for durability and objectual transcendence. Said in a much easier way to understand; when I leave my apartment in Ciutat Vella, the Ikea objects we have at home will end up among a pile of waste or will remain embedded in the wall. On the contrary, if my parents have not expelled me from the will, the Vinçon furniture we keep in the Grid will outlive me for decades and I will defend them tooth and nail as if they were the original score of Wolfgang Mozart's Jupiter.
Vinçon was not Ikea, and that's why I am now very happy at the DHUB, surrounded by many Barcelonians who morbidly accumulate gaily before a roll of gift wrapping paper from our beloved store to cut a small piece and keep it as a souvenir; I spy on them happily remembering the years of pre-Olympic prosperity, when we were all delighted to be PSC cosmopolitans and being Catalan was a folkloric trait just like being an Eskimo. A time that now returns with the horrifying burp of the farcical repetition of knowing ourselves to be part of a colonized tribe and, if that weren't enough, of settling for the poor man's fucking white shelf. Life's paradoxes, I think as I get out of the bind, I anticipate this notoriously Marxist (therefore resentful) article, but still humming to myself a "visca l'Eixample" and death to these Swedes, shitty fans.