Controversial souvenirs back on Barcelona store shelves

After announcing it would stop selling controversial pins featuring "antisocial" images of Barcelona, a bookstore has backtracked and is selling them again at two of its franchises in the Catalan capital.

La Central, the company that runs the bookstores at the municipally owned Barcelona History Museum (Muhba) and at the Macba contemporary art museum, initially bowed to pressure from city officials to take them off the shelves.

The small pins come in several models, alternately depicting a prostitute, a thief, illegal street vendors and Catalan police beating up a person, all with the single word "Barcelona." The city said the items "promote antisocial behavior" and that this "is not the image of the city that should be projected from a municipal site."

News of the incident leaked to the media, and La Central's owners say they received so many shows of support that they reconsidered their decision to pull the pins. "Our first intention was to avoid a fuss and to let things quieten down," said Antonio Ramírez. "But the shows of sympathy, support and solidarity were so numerous that they wouldn't fit inside this building. So, since people are asking for them, there they are."

Ramírez stresses that they're not trying to be defiant, just to give people what they want. He also says the pins do not encourage any type of antisocial behavior, and that they're simply symbolic and ironic.

Meanwhile, a dozen other stores in Barcelona have contacted the designer of the pins, the architecture studio Chapateao, to place orders. The architect Arcadi Royo, who co-designed the gift items two years ago with his partner Margalida Montoya, told the Efe news agency that they have received lots of messages of support as well, and only one e-mail filled with reproaches. Individual customers have also asked them where they can buy the pins, which have become collector's items overnight.

The architects, which do graphic design on the side to make up for a lack of projects, said they are feeling overwhelmed by the demand. "We're a small company, we're self-employed, but we're replying to everyone who writes to us, even people from here who live abroad," said Royo. "We defend freedom of expression and citizen-based criticism with a sense of humor."

At the political level, the president of the leftist-green group ICV-EUiA, Ricard Gomà, said the pins were "not the expression of what Barcelona is," but wondered whether the mayor would also ban books expressing ideas that contradict the Barcelona model.

"Regardless of whether you like them conceptually or not, you cannot censor an author's creativity," he said.

In the meantime, the issue has sparked a renewed debate on the level of permissiveness in Barcelona, a city where the new local CiU government boasts of "cracking down" on antisocial behavior such as walking around in bathing suits, urinating in public, selling wares without a license or making too much noise.