The story of how the Valencian Sergio Jaen has reached the Eurovision final this Saturday, May 11, is as surprising as that of Nebulossa, the Spanish representative in the song contest, or the Madrid band Megara, which reached this edition through the San Marino candidacy. Jaén is only 22 years old, but he has already been living in the United Kingdom for five years. She is now in Malmö (Sweden), headquarters of the festival this year, collaborating with the entire visual proposal of the Irish song Doomsday Blue.
The scenery that accompanies the singer Bambie Thug is so bombastic (despite having a limited budget) that it has managed to place itself on the radar of Eurofans. In the first semi-final on Tuesday she qualified to compete this Saturday. The Spaniard is responsible for staging the so-called Ouija pop of the sinister and at the same time luminous Irish artist.
Jaén had an epiphany precisely while watching the 2013 edition of Eurovision on television. “It was in Malmö and with the same presenter as this year,” he explains to this newspaper this Friday from the Swedish city. At that moment, she found a personal passion, the European Song Festival, and a professional calling. Now she combines both in the same place that she watched on television eleven years ago. “That day I started designing sets and this Eurovision is the first time I have managed to do something like that on a professional level,” she celebrates.
The Valencian arrived in the United Kingdom when he came of age to study Film and Television at the University of the Arts in London (UAL). But he coincided with the pandemic and was barely able to attend in-person classes. “I’m ambitious and stubborn, so I started working as hard as I could until I returned to the path I had set for myself,” he confesses. He ended up producing a music video for Dua Lipa. From there, Irish television called him to produce the video of their candidate and, when the one from Elche discovered that they had not thought about the scenery, he proposed an idea that dazzled this Tuesday in Malmö, although it only had two and a half weeks to work on it. “There are those who doubted that I could do it because of my age, but I have a great advantage, that I know Eurovision very well, I know its times and what it is looking for visually,” explains the Spaniard.
Studying the personality of the Irish representative and working with her on the music video for Doomsday Blue, Jaén understood what the strong points of the proposal were and transferred them to live television production. “I have opted for a lot of close-ups, which is something that is missed this year and that usually connects with the viewer,” he says. In order not to disperse concepts, the Spaniard has delimited the action within a circle typical of a spiritual ritual of no more than three meters in length, “with only two people on stage, representing a toxic relationship,” he reveals.
Bambie Thug, whose particular artistic identity represents a kind of witch centennial, declared after his performance that the pageant censored his fake tattoos with slogans in support of Palestine written in Ogham, a Celtic language used by the druids. Jaén assures that they are preparing surprises for his performance in Saturday’s final, although they do not necessarily have to do with a political demand.
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