As soon as you enter the Joan Miro park, the visitor comes across dozens of strollers, some with snoozing babies and others empty, guarded by vigilant parents awaiting the faltering steps of their offspring. The image that this large space, equivalent to four blocks of the Eixample, offers today is that of a children's city, with very fertile birth rates. A most distorted vision. The latest municipal statistics indicate that in 2022 only 11,295 births were recorded in Barcelona, 15.2% less than the average for the 2010-2020 period and the lowest figure since 1900, with the exception of 1939, at the end of the Civil War. . Today, and will surely do so again tomorrow and Monday, the recreational offer of La Mercè has attracted thousands of families with their children.
The multitude of people who have taken over the park have been spread across the five delimited areas: Bosquet, Antigua i Barbuda, Palmeres, Llac and Sota Llac, with a varied menu of games, attractions and theatre. In the first, in Bosquet, right on the corner that overlooks the fire brigade facilities, the clown Carlo Mô has worked morning and afternoon on a more than difficult mission, an almost impossible challenge, that his show, Yougur, would interest both adults and children. Carlo has made an appearance carrying on his back a large wall made of boxes and more cardboard boxes that, inevitably, have been falling. He was trying to clumsily, and deliberately unsuccessfully, recompose this sort of platform. “I created this work in 2020, just before covid, and I was not able to release it until 2022. During the pandemic things became very complicated, I had to close my theater school in Sant Antoni...”, Carlo said at the end of his first performance, more difficult than when he presents it in a room with an adult audience. Here he has had to please a heterogeneous audience, of all ages, with boisterous children who wanted to get on stage, pick up the boxes, play... “I act a bit of a court tamer,” commented the artist who invokes in Yougur the Greek myth of Sisyphus, condemned to push a giant boulder up a mountain until he reaches the top, falls, and so on again and again. Carlo Mô alludes to Sisyphus as a metaphor for useless effort. Boxes as absurd obligations that we impose on ourselves. The little ones, spontaneously, have dedicated themselves to dismantling them, innocently demolishing the sterile loads.
A few meters away, more circus with the couple of clows and tightrope walkers made up of Leandre Ribera and Laura Miralbés, who riding a flying bicycle suggest a poetic trip to the moon.
The park protected by the sculpture Dona i Ocell by Miró also hosts these days of La Mercè the proposals developed by the Antigua i 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 have documented their children's progress towards heights with their mobile phones. Among the audience, three grandmothers commented happily this morning that they could finally enjoy the party without obligations, that until Tuesday they will not have to take care of their grandchildren again. “Today they are with their parents,” Candela whispered smiling while she ordered a beer at a food truck.
Laughter, screams of excitement and the stunned faces of the parents as they followed the evolution of their little ones on the different attractions. But Joan Miró's park also reveals the other side of Barcelona, that of the homeless people who subsist outdoors, oblivious to the Mercè celebrations.
