If you liked the headline"An exhibition entitled "Licence to offend" is cancelled in case someone might be offended" you will enjoy even more this one:"Exhibition of censored works censored".
The parish of Escaldes-Engordany, the second most populated after Andorra la Vieja in the Principality of Andorra, was the first stop of the travelling exhibition entitled"Censorship is the curator of this exhibition" of the Museum of Forbidden Art in Barcelona. And its title was fulfilled like a satirical prophecy. The exhibition was censored.
The piece that triggered the cancellation of the exhibition by the cònsol major (the equivalent here of mayoress) of Escaldes-Engordany, Rosa Gili, was the cover of issue 1178 of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo (14/01/2015) with a drawing by Rénald Luzier "Luz".
This was the cover of the first issue that hit the streets after the attack on 7 January 2015.
On that day, the brothers, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, stormed the Paris headquarters of the weekly Charlie Hebdo with guns and killed twelve people. Eight of them were members of the editorial staff: five cartoonists (Wolinski, Cabu, Honoré, Tignous and Charb, the editor-in-chief), a proofreader (Mustapha Ourrad), a psychoanalyst (Elsa Cayat) and an anti-neoliberal economist, Bernard Maris, known as "Oncle Bernard".
Rosa Gili decided to remove the piece for "state security reasons" when the exhibition was already mounted and announced, to which the Comú (City Council) had invited the public:
"Forbidden art comes out of the shadows to make you think, feel and question".
The organisers then told her that if the exhibition was amputated, they refused to allow it to open censored, and she decided to cancel it. Rosa Gili twisted the story and someone could understand that it was the organisers who withdrew it or that it was something consensual. However, the museum in charge of the censored exhibition has had to make it clear thatthe cancellation was a unilateral decision. The only two options offered by Rosa Gili were censorship or cancellation.
Rosa Gili confessed without any qualms that she censored the exhibition:
"Yes, yesterday I censored censorship".
After saying that he "deeply regretted it because it generated a lot of unrest", as is usual among cynical politicians he had the saintly nerve to add:
"I am obviously in favour of freedom of expression, of dialogue (...) but I didn't know what I was going to find".
This is not even a bad excuse. Are you telling us that you thought that in an exhibition of censored works you would find drawings of unicorns and images of the Teletubbies?
And this is how she argued her capitulation after becoming the censor curator who predicted the title of the exhibition:
We are a small country, in four days we have Els Jocs dels Petits Estats d'Europa, an important concentration of people (...) given the international context, given that there is a 5 out of 5 alert in France, 4 out of 5 in Spain (...) and I have certain convictions as a person, but I believe that when you are a politician and have responsibility, your convictions can be put aside for the greater good, which is State security" (...).) and I have certain convictions as a person, but I believe that when you are a politician and you have responsibility, you can put your convictions aside for the greater good, which is the security of the state" (...) the police told me that I did what I had to do and I also informed the government of this decision".
You can listen to his full statement in this video.
