End of July 2016. It’s been a year since Ada Colau became the mayor of Barcelona for the first time and she’s been governing with the Socialists for just two months. The first deputy mayor, Gerardo Pisarello, leads the BComú campaign to erase from the streets of the city and especially from the City Hall symbols of other eras that recall the monarchy, the slave past of some illustrious Barcelona residents or characters who made a career during the Franco regime.
In one of its ramps, the Colau team decides that it is necessary to evict from the Great House a very discreet sculpture located at the foot of the staircase of honor that leads to the Saló de Cent. His sin, apparently, was inscribed on a plinth: there is a legend that the piece of art, a sports bag with the torch and the five Olympic rings, was given as a gift by the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Joan Antoni Samaranch in his city to remember the Olympic Games of 1992. The controversy is served. The socialists show disagreement with the gesture of their partners and, to avoid such a premature fire, Pisarello decides to throw water on the fire. The sculpture will remain in place, but the inscription will be removed. And so it was until this week Jaume Collboni ordered its replacement.
Joan Mora’s sculpture was commissioned by the IOC to honor the host city of the Games of the XXV Olympiad. The artist, who learned of the intention of the municipal officials to archive the work in a warehouse, could not believe it. In a conversation with Luis Benvenuty’s journalist, he expressed his astonishment: “But if this work does not praise Samaranch or Francoism! It is a sports bag with a torch!”.
Joan Mora was a realistic sculptor who reproduced everyday objects in marble and stone. The piece of discord, entitled Olympic Barcelona, ??was installed in the lobby of the City Hall in 1996.
The removal – in the last instance, only half-heartedly – ??of the sculptural piece was a concession of the commons to the CUP, then present in the Barcelona City Council, the voice of the anti-system consciousness of some commons already caught in the nets of the system After a coffee conversation with the author, Pisarello informed him of the Solomonic decision: the piece would remain on the site, but the original inscription would be removed and replaced by a memorial to the Olympic volunteers.
That gesture by BComú stuck like a thorn in the skin of Jaume Collboni, who went so far as to suggest, as a lesser evil, that the sculpture should be temporarily exhibited at the Olympic and Sports Museum of Mont- judge, to which, by the way, in the end the name of Joan Antoni Samaranch was not changed, as the formation of Ada Colau threatened to do at the time. Former mayor Xavier Trias was also very critical of the attitude of the commons, who he reminded that “the Games represent what we can do together” and that it was absurd to associate them with the ideology of any one person. Trias went so far as to ask Colau by letter to reconsider the decision, and also the president of the popular municipal group, Alberto Fernández, called for the maintenance of the sculpture.
Seven and a half years after one of the most prominent episodes of the war of symbols that Barcelona experienced at that time, Mayor Collboni has determined that things return to their proper place. He did it without making a sound. Only the most observant municipal workers who passed by the corner where the sculpture is yesterday noticed the change. Joan Antoni Samaranch – his name discreetly inscribed on a plinth – has returned to the pedestal from which Ada Colau kicked him out.
