Last week we heard about the reaction of the Glòries Vecinos associations to the Barcelona City Council’s announcement to dedicate a statue to singers Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé. The artwork, which has yet to be designed, as has been planned since the current municipal government, must pay tribute to the song’s memorable performers. Barcelonathe hymn of the 1992 Olympic Games. Naturally, the desire to dedicate some permanent monuments to the artists came from here. Socialist Jaume Colboni suggested in 2018 that Mercury and Caballe reject a street, claiming that the city owed “a great debt to all the artists who represent them at the Barcelona Olympics, with music that has inspired an entire generation.” At the end of 2023, the ponencia del nomenclátor, in collaboration with Colboni and the mayor, agreed to allocate a viewpoint for singers in the new space between Calle Castillejos and Plaza de las Glòries. Now they wanted to go ahead with the erection of a statue, but the proposal was opposed by the neighborhood associations of Fort Pink, Clute, Poblenou and Sagrada Familia.
Discussions about those that are symbolic references in urban space tend to be productive, because although they can be simple stories – the name of a street, or a statue on a city corner – they are not a minor matter for nothing. It remains only to think about the importance witnessed in the process of democratic consolidation of the decisions surrounding changing the names of the streets assigned to figures of the dictatorship. More recently, in the case of Barcelona, the volatility of the old square of Antonio López, Marquis de Comillas I, a businessman who became wealthy through the slave trade during the nineteenth century, which led to the presidency of the social movements and the decision of the Ayuntamiento, allowed it to be renamed in 2022 after Idrissa Diallo, a Guinean immigrant who died in 2012, after spending time in a foreign detention center. (CIA).
Therefore, it seems important the position of the old associations regarding the statue which declares that it has no problem with Freddie Mercury, but only with Montserrat Caballé, for very specific reasons. Without questioning at any time the singer’s artistic value, they consider that “a person who has proven his residence abroad and has been tried and convicted on charges of tax fraud does not constitute an example for nothing.” It is clear, frank and concrete. It’s not about demonizing the club, it’s about stigmatizing behavior that goes hand in hand with the idea expressed by 79.5% of those interviewed for the CIS this summer, when they declared that “cheating at the Hacienda is cheating the rest of the citizens.” Sometimes simple stories explain very big stories worth telling.