It doesn’t just happen in Barcelona. The posters for the major holidays often lead to heated controversies in the towns. Because of the aesthetics, because the content is too (or too little) daring or simply because it is not at all simple for the author’s aesthetic taste to please a majority of residents. But, at other times, the discussion takes place behind closed doors, among the small town halls. It is the story that the designer Claret Serrahima tells that happened to him in 2010 during the Mercè festivities.
At that time, Jordi Hereu was the mayor of the Catalan capital and Jordi Martí, the Culture delegate. Serrahima was commissioned to make the Mercè poster. “But I was excited to create a cake”, recalls the artist. He wanted that, as, for example, Sant Joan has cake, Mercè also had a sweet. The designer decided that the protagonist of the cake was the fig. “I wanted a fruit to take center stage. September is fig season and is Mediterranean. It’s also humble: when it’s over, it’s over, with figs it’s not like with others, which we end up having all year because they’re brought from other places”, he argues.
“At the City Council they were worried about the feminist groups”, recalls the designer, who remembers the first obstacles he had to overcome with regard to the project. In the big house I was worried about the certain sexual connotation that the fruit has. It could give rise to bad interpretations, explains the designer. “But, finally, they accepted the project for me after struggling”, comments Serrahima.
The idea was to present the Mercè candy and the poster, both featuring figs. The artist contacted the pastry school in Barcelona and they got to work. “The bundles of Mercè were made”, says Serrahima. “They had figs and cream”, he describes 13 years later.
And he continued working on the poster, with the fig as the protagonist. “The poster and the cake had to follow the same line”, he insists. Serrahima already had several sketches done when, unexpectedly, the project was knocked over.
“It was the mayor’s advisers who decided that it was not suitable”, says the designer. These were not easy times in the political sphere for Mayor Hereu. Among other controversies, it was the time of the consultation on the Diagonal reform, with an unexpected result for the rulers.
According to Serrahima, the advisers were afraid of two sentences made in Catalan that use this word “They understood that you could say that the mayor is a fig tree”, he says about an expression that means a person without firmness. “They were also afraid that it would be said that Barcelona sucks”, as is usually said when something falters or stops working.
Finally, Serrahima, who felt censured, had to work on another poster, which was the one that was finally shown at the 2010 festivities. “I tried to get twenty people to write Mercè and then make a composition with a letter from each”, he evokes.
Despite the fact that the fig poster was kept in a drawer, part of Serrahima’s idea has become a reality. Since last year, Mercè has had its dessert and, paradoxically, it is a fig, almond and honey cake with a massasablé base. Promoted by the Barcelona Pastry Guild, it was created last year and this year it is sold in a hundred pastry shops.
