As the editors always remember, “there is life after Sant Jordi”. There are also, therefore, literary recommendations. El poder en scena, by professors Alan Salvadó and Jordi Balló, serves as my open fire prescription of readings that have life beyond Sant Jordi. This Sunday, I closely witnessed the breakfast that the City Council organizes to open the day on this flag day, and seeing Mayor Ada Colau and Yolanda DÃaz, I could not stop thinking about the essence of this collective book that analyzes visual motifs in the public sphere.
Yolanda and her team are friendly. They have a lot of communicative intuition. But here, the host of the event, Mayoress Colau, is not left behind. His irruption on the scene to open the institutional day of Sant Jordi proved it again.
The chocolate bar that Jordi Pujol offered at the Palau de la Generalitat during his time as president is a long way off and that his successors moved and eventually made disappear. But on Sunday, at the Palau de la Virreina (again, a palace), the non-coffee drinkers could drink chocolate pastries in a cup. In La Virreina. It reminded me of that book, El virrei, about Pujol. And in the midst of the general bewilderment of Catalan politics, so weak that it sounds like what is being cooked on the mountain side of Plaça Sant Jaume, there we had her, the mayor, or something more than that, receiving the vice-president of the Government of Spain
“Location, location, location”, said the perfidious Francis Underwood in the first chapter of the House of cards series. Location plays an important role in the game’s intentional visual construction of power and its protagonists. The place says a lot, but also how you get in and out, and also who you do it with.
This Sunday, when most of the authors and journalists had already identified themselves at the entrance to La Virreina, Ada entered with Yolanda, like the great artists, smiling in the wind and followed by a large group of people ( as an entourage) who, like them, did not have to give a name. This is where power and the people came in. And just like that, they left at the end of the event, after the photo of the two heads with the writers, and then they took an upward route along the Rambla, another important scene of the Barcelona public sphere, which at those hours of the morning it was still passable.
These days (and Sant Jordi itself), there have been pre-campaign electoral events for all the candidates for the mayoralty of Barcelona, ​​but none so far that exuded as much power as this one. Ada knows what she’s doing when she joins her brand with Yolanda’s and not with Podemos.
Most of the other candidates define themselves based on her and whether they will make her mayor or not. But in this only Xavier Trias, another aspirant for re-election (like her), who also like Colau lived in the big house (another palace) and who also like the current mayor knows the importance of putting in play, at the right time, the game mark or the staff.
