In the photo that you can see in this information it seems that four young sub-Saharans are trying to jump over a very high fence. They are not people, they are children; and the Fallero artist who created the composition pursued what has been achieved: to impact the public. So much so that last Saturday night, a group of a dozen people, including several sub-Saharans, tried to climb the fence to get them down when they understood that it was a mockery or an inappropriate staging of a drama, of a reality present in many fences, mainly in Europe.
Another fact: these four ninots are installed on the fence that separates the public from the mascletàs shooting area in the Valencia City Hall square, for safety. And a few meters from the municipal falla, a formidable ode to peace conceived and built by Pere Baenas and designed by Esif, one of the urban artists most sensitive to the social crisis. The falla is composed of two enormous doves and has the motto Two doves, one branch, which is a pacifist plea. That of the migrants is a scene rescued from the failure of the meditator of 2020, that of the pandemic that burned almost secretly.
The national police had to intervene due to the possibility that those who were outraged by the scene would end up taking down or destroying the ninots. It was the police themselves who explained to the indignant people the meaning of the work, and they understood that the sequence had been designed precisely to denounce how thousands of people try, often without success, to flee from misery, from war, from hunger. , towards a land that closes its doors to them, with high fences and repressive measures.
What happened on Saturday in this falla confirms the power of Fallas art, a form of creativity that was born more than a century and a half ago with a critical will, with an irreverent vocation, with the need to provoke a reaction in those who contemplate the Fallas monuments. This tradition has been maintained with ups and downs, with periods of great discursive power, such as during the Republic or during the transition, and with times when Fallas art was as dormant as the front pages of the newspapers.
Fallas art is not the object of admiration among the critical currents of the genre, among other reasons because it is ephemeral: everything disappears in the Nit de la Cremà, on the night of Sant Josep, when each and every one of the more than 700 fallaes – large and children – are victims of the fire that our ancestors activated to celebrate the change of solstice and scare away evil spirits.
It is a historical injustice. Fallas art has known how, year after year, to offer its acidic view of current political, cultural, social, economic, cultural and even international events. With vibrant bets such as this year's winning falla in the Special Section (those with the largest budget), which is the Antiga de Campanar; a clear warning of the dangers of climate change. A given: the winning falla is located in the neighborhood where not long ago the two-tower building burned, causing the death of ten people and hundreds of victims.
The saddest thing is that every year more Fallas commissions prefer to allocate money to generating festive activity – festivals, games, drinks and food – than to generating good Fallas monuments. Phenomena that are especially palpable in the neighborhoods and that are causing more Fallas artists every year to choose to leave this emblematic profession due to the possibility of being able to earn a living with the few commissions.
What happened on Saturday in the Plaza del Ayuntamiento is confirmation of the enormous usefulness of Fallas art, its capacity to generate emotion and, in parallel, reflection on the moment we have had to live through. In a festival visited by hundreds of thousands of people every year, who find in these fallaes a unique attraction to observe the beauty, very baroque at times, of the monumental composition of the ninots and their particular stories.
It is, finally, a victory for those who consider that the failures are a unique example in the world to impact the souls of those who observe them. In this case, four ninots trying to jump a valley in the heart of Valencia.
