As soon as they enter the Joan Miró park, the visitor encounters dozens of prams, some with sleeping babies and others empty, guarded by watchful parents watching their children’s faltering steps. The image offered yesterday by this large space, equivalent to four blocks of the Eixample, was that of a city for children, with fertile birth rates. A distorted view, which does not match reality at all. The latest municipal statistics indicate that in 2022 only 11,295 births were recorded in Barcelona, ??15.2% less than the average for the period 2010-2020 and the lowest figure since 1900, with the exception of 1939, at the end of the War civil La Mercè’s recreational offer attracted thousands of families with their children yesterday, and will surely do so again today and tomorrow.
The multitude of people who entered the park were distributed among the five delimited areas: Bosquet, Antiga i Barbuda, Palmeres, Lac and Sota Lac, with a varied menu of games, attractions and theater. In the first, El Bosquet, right on the corner with the fire brigade facilities, the clown Carlo Mô worked morning and afternoon on a more than difficult mission, in an almost impossible challenge, that his show, Yougur, was so interesting adults as well as children. Carlo made his presence felt by carrying on his back a large wall made of boxes and more cardboard boxes which, inevitably, kept falling. I was trying to crudely and deliberately put this kind of platform back together, without success. “I created this work in 2020, just before covid, and I couldn’t premiere it until 2022. During the pandemic, things got very complicated, I had to close my theater school in Sant Antoni…”, explained Carlo when he finished his first performance, more laborious than when he presents it in a room with an adult audience . Here he had to please a heterogeneous audience, of all ages, with boisterous children who wanted to get on stage, grab the boxes, play… “I play a bit of a track tamer”, commented the artist, who a Yougur invokes the Greek myth of Sisyphus, condemned to push a giant rock up a mountain until it reaches the top, falls, and so on and on. Carlo Mô alludes to Sisyphus as a metaphor for futile effort. The boxes as absurd obligations that we impose on ourselves. The children, spontaneously, dedicated themselves to dismantling them, innocently demolishing the sterile loads.
A few meters away, more circus with the pair of clowns and tightrope walkers made up of Leandre Ribera and Laura Miralbés, who on top of a flying bicycle suggested a poetic journey to the moon.
The park protected by Miró’s Woman and Bird sculpture also hosts these days of Mercè the proposals developed by the Antigua and Barbuda theater company. One of the most requested is Tingalya, a small ferris wheel inspired by the universe of the Swiss painter and sculptor Jean Tingaly, which invites children to hang in baskets. The only requirement is not to exceed 45 kilos in weight. Parents used their mobile phones to document their children’s journey to the heights. Among the audience, three grandmothers commented happily that they could enjoy the party without obligations, that they will not have to take care of their grandchildren again until Tuesday. “Today they are with their parents”, whispered Candela smiling while ordering a beer from a food truck.
Laughter, screams of excitement and the dazed faces of the parents as they followed the evolution of the scoundrel at the different attractions. But Joan Miró’s park also showed the other side of Barcelona, ??that of the homeless who subsist in the open outside the Mercè celebrations.
