End of July 2016. It has been a year since Ada Colau became mayor of Barcelona for the first time and she has been governing with the socialists for just two months. The first deputy mayor, Gerardo Pisarello, directs the BComú campaign to erase from the streets of the city and especially from the City Hall symbols from other eras that recall the monarchy, the slave past of some illustrious Barcelonans or characters who made their careers during Francoism.
In one of their outbursts, Colau's team decides that a very discreet sculpture located at the foot of the staircase that leads to the Saló de Cent must be evicted from the Casa Gran. His sin, apparently, is inscribed on a base. In it, a legend explains that the piece, a sports bag with the torch and the five Olympic rings, was given by the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Juan Antonio Samaranch to his city to remember the 1992 Olympic Games. The controversy is served. The socialists show their disagreement with the gesture of their partners and, to avoid such a premature fire, Pisarello decides to pour water on the fire. The sculpture will remain in place, but the inscription will be removed. And so on until this week Jaume Collboni ordered his replacement.
The sculpture by Joan Mora was commissioned by the IOC to pay tribute to the host city of the Games of the XXV Olympiad. On his day, the artist, who learned of the municipal officials' intention to archive the work in a warehouse, could not help but be astonished. In conversation with La Vanguardia journalist Luis Benvenuty, he expressed his astonishment like this: “But this work does not exalt either Samaranch or the Franco regime! “It's a sports bag with a torch!”
Joan Mora was a realist sculptor who reproduced everyday objects in marble and stone. The piece of contention, titled Olympic Barcelona, was installed in the lobby of City Hall in 1996.
The withdrawal - ultimately only half - of the sculptural piece was a concession from the commons to the CUP, then present in the Barcelona City Council, the anti-system Jiminy Grillo of the commons already trapped in the networks of the system. After a coffee conversation with the author, Pisarello informed him of his Solomonic decision: the piece would continue in its location but the original inscription would be removed and replaced with a souvenir to the Olympic volunteers.
That gesture from 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 be provisionally exhibited in the Olympic and Sports Museum of Montjuïc, to which, by the way, In the end, his name was not changed from Juan Antonio Samaranch as the formation of Ada Colau threatened to do at that time. Former mayor Xavier Trias was also very critical of the attitude of the common people, to whom he reminded that “the Games represent what we can all do together” and that it was absurd to associate them with the ideology of any person. Trias even asked Colau by letter to reconsider his decision and also the president of the popular municipal group, Alberto Fernández, championed the maintenance of the sculpture.
Seven and a half years after that notable episode of the war of symbols that Barcelona experienced at that time, Mayor Collboni has determined that things return to their place. He has done it without making a noise. Only the most observant municipal workers who passed by the corner where the sculpture is located yesterday noticed the change. Juan Antonio Samaranch – his name discreetly inscribed on a pedestal – has returned to the pedestal from which Ada Colau removed him.
