The musician receives the Gold Medal for Cultural Merit from Barcelona City Council

Image Source - Google | Image by-Wikimedia Commons 


Jaume Sisa received this Monday the Gold Medal for Cultural Merit from the Barcelona City Council, a recognition agreed by all the municipal groups for "intergalactic unanimity", as highlighted by the deputy mayor Jordi Martí in the Saló de One hundred. And the first thing you think is: how come I didn't have it yet? "Maybe we'll release it a little late", admitted Martí. Sooner or later , however, these are irrelevant concepts for the galactic singer-songwriter because he is bound to infinity, as he demonstrated at the end of the act singing, a cappella, Me'n vaige con globus , one of the wonders of the disc Live the freedom (2000).



Instead of a speech of thanks, Sisa gave a song, which is what troubadours do: “I'm leaving with balloons, I feel light. / I will enter through the entanglement of the sky. / Out of sight I will be lost. / I don't know if I'll come back. No, no, I don't know [...] / I raise my eyes and beyond the horizon / I let myself go following the inspiration. / My song crosses the air, / space open to another dimension. / I leave with balloons, I bind infinity. The aerial melody of love", sang who knows if also remembering the long-lost Pau Riba , another spirit who one day negotiated with the infinite. 


The event followed the usual protocol order, with speeches by the institutional representatives (first the mayor, Ada Colau, and then Martí) and the gloss, in this case by stage director Oriol Broggi. Predictably, there have been puns to fit song verses into the eulogies. Sisa's songbook is too delicious not to fill the speeches with words and ideas borrowed from his unique and inimitable imagination




For a more galactic Barcelona


"The Saló de Cent is your home, if it is someone's home", said Colau, who claimed that "we can all be galactic". "You embody that rogue and disruptive Barcelona that renewed the culture", added the mayoress, who also praised music that she considers "a reflection of the Barcelona that we like best, free, diverse and welcoming". "Barcelona is obviously your home", said Colau before wishing "that we don't feel afraid to offer our home".




"It's always good for the City Council to be a little more galactic", assured Jordi Martí at the beginning of a speech in which he introduced one of the keys to interpreting Sisa's life and work ("a tenderness childish and poignant at the same time") and has expressed a collective longing for Barcelona to resemble Sisa. Totally in favor.


Broggi has been more vocal in his praise of Sisa, because he has even brandished a megaphone to project to infinity and beyond the virtues of Sisa, a man "so brave and so audacious" to imagine a different city. "The most important thing to make a handful of humans grow is a poet, an explorer, a sage, a genius", said Broggi, trying to explain in a few words how unattainable what the author of The seventh heaven for the galaxy.