Last week the reaction of the neighborhood associations to the announcement of dedicating a sculpture to the singers Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé was known. The artistic piece, which would still have to be designed, according to what has been proposed by the current municipal government, was to pay tribute to the two unforgettable performers of the song Barcelonaanthem of the . In fact, the desire to dedicate some permanent vestige to the two artists goes back a long way. The socialist Jaume Collboni proposed in 2018 that Mercury and Caballé each have a street, claiming that the city had “an outstanding debt with the two artists for everything they represented for the Olympics, with music that inspired an entire generation.” At the end of 2023, with the mayor now in place, the gazetteer’s report approved allocating a viewpoint to the two singers in the new space between Castillejos Street and Plaça de las Glòries. But the proposal has been met with opposition from the neighborhood associations of the Fort Pienc, Clot, Poblenou and Sagrada Familia neighborhoods.
Debates about who are the symbolic references in the urban space usually occur, because, although they may seem like minimal stories – the name of a street, a statue in a corner of a city -, they are not a minor issue at all. You only need to think about the importance that the decisions regarding the change of names of the streets dedicated to figures of the dictatorship had in the process of democratic consolidation. Or more recently, in the case of Barcelona, the first Marquis of Comillas, a businessman who had enriched himself with the slave trade during the 19th century, which the pressure of social movements and the decision of the City Council allowed to be renamed in 2022 as Idrissa Diallo, a Guinean migrant who died in 2012, after having gone through the
For this reason, the position of the neighborhood associations regarding the statue seems significant since they declare that they do not have any problem with , but they do have a problem with , and for very specific reasons. Without ever questioning the artistic value of the singer, they consider that “a person who established his residence abroad and who was tried and convicted of tax fraud does not constitute an example for anyone.” It is clear, forceful, and concrete. It is not about demonizing anyone, but about stigmatizing a behavior that is linked to the idea that 79.5% of those interviewed expressed this summer, when they declared that “cheating the Treasury is deceiving the rest of the citizens.” Minimal stories sometimes explain very big stories, which deserve to be told.
