José Polo published in this newspaper on Sunday that, in 2010, a poster by Claret Serrahima for the Mercè festivities was rejected by mayor Hereu’s advisors. The story is juicy. As Serrahima explains, he wanted – linked to the Mercè poster of that year – to create a new cake in honor of this godmother. If Saint John has a cake, Mercè would have a cake with his name on it. That would be cool.
So, after a call from the designer, the School of Pastry in Barcelona started working on the new cake. Meanwhile, Serrahima was sketching. On Sunday, La Vanguardia published one: a large fig cut in half, with a maroon and appetizing interior. But, when it seemed that everything was on the right track and the poster would soon go to print, the mayor’s advisers stepped in and saw a flaw. The sexual connotation of the word fig? not very well They maligned that there would be perverse people who would say that the mayor was a figaflor, or that Barcelona was a figa.
Thirteen years later, Hereu is no longer in the mayor’s office. He has forgotten all about it to the point that, although he held a consultation for the citizens to decide if we wanted a tram along Diagonal (and he won the no, let’s remember that), now they are building the tram as if the consultation didn’t had ever been done. After Hereu we had Trias, Colau and Collboni. From this perspective, how would that fig that was not be perceived now? Would they have considered it a sign of feminist empowerment or a heteropatriarchal insult?
Meanwhile, in Figueres, on Sunday they closed the annual gastronomic campaign dedicated to the fig, which produces the flower and cream of Emporda restaurants. They started in 2016 under the name Menja’t la Figa, but now it’s called Enfiga’t, which is more ambiguous. The fig always brings trouble.
