Editorial: Francoist Spain and Questions of Otherness

Art and the Institutionalization of Postcolonial Theory

Postcolonial theory, since its inception, has fulfilled the historical function to reconcile Cultural Studies with one of the greatest criticisms leveled against it: its lack of commitment to show the historically constructed genealogies of colonial power. Given the problems that Spanish society and successive post-Francoist governments have with their country’s historical memory, it is not surprising that interest in the postcolonial perspective has been dispersed and inconsistent at an institutional level. As shown by the recent fall of monuments to historical figures involved in colonization worldwide, it has now become impossible to ignore this perspective in all areas of the humanities. The Spanish academy has integrated it very slowly, and it is far from being fully incorporated with institutional policies and strategies, unlike in some institutions in the UK. The Open University and the University of the Arts London, for example, include decolonization in their strategic lines, and Tate Britain has developed programs to review their inclusivity. But perhaps the boldest move to date was made by the University of Glasgow in 2019: after acknowledging it benefited by millions of pounds from the slave trade, it signed an agreement with the Universities of the West Indies to spend £20 m in reparations. Precisely one of the reasons for resisting such an approach in Spain is that the full recognition of a postcolonial perspective at an institutional level would necessarily mean starting to generate policies of reparation. Such policies could possibly suggest the need for changes in power structures: the conservative organization of field knowledges for example does not allow interdisciplinarity in History of Art departments that only accept staff holding PhDs in History of Art. This is symptomatic of the lack of support for the professional renovation of our field with new methodologies and for fostering dialogues with different perspectives and methods. In Spain it is currently difficult to imagine the organization of themed exhibitions that address colonial legacies in relation to Spain’s cultural heritage, for example focusing on “Colonial Picasso” or “The Prado Museum and Colonization,” which would force us to reassess Spanish art and to examine the complicities of the discipline of art history and its institutions in coloniality. Furthermore, such exhibitions would mean questioning national landmarks that continue to grant Spanish art history international importance.

Nevertheless, two major museums in Spain have recently begun to address colonial issues in their exhibitions and curatorial projects through their public program spaces. It is important to examine the exhibitions of these “Museos Nacionales” that house major collections, and how they are linked to the creation of critical narratives involving the colonial history of Spain in their permanent and official exhibitions.¹ In 2019 the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA) held its first exhibition adopting a postcolonial perspective. The Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid has just begun this year (2020) to acquire work by contemporary indigenous artists from Spain’s former colonies in Latin American, thus going beyond the idea of “Latin American art” of European descent. But so far the Reina Sofía Museum has only organized one collective exhibition addressing colonialism in its historical narrative: Principio Potosí, held in 2010 to mark the Bicentennial of Latin American Independence (which went almost unnoticed in Spain).² In the Reina Sofía Museum, as an art institution with a permanent collection, the question of colonial structures that order our imaginaries has often been avoided and replaced with the all-inclusive term “Latin American art.”³ This tendency is interesting, considering that Latin America’s colonial history has given its art a place at an international level. There is then a continuity between current Spanish interests in “Latin American art” and the early twentieth-century strategy that consolidated the term “Hispanoamérica,”⁴ a concept that was mobilized by the Franco regime in order to present “Spain” to the developed world as a mediator with a fertile, vast, and young Latin American world.

But the question of coloniality beyond confronting dictatorships goes beyond a mere inclusion or thematization of the art of Latin America or any other geography of the former colonies: it implies, first of all, a commitment to understanding and revealing the historical complicities of our knowledge apparatuses with coloniality, the intellectual and cultural alliances that have been established, and the structures that make colonial power relations possible, asking ourselves how they are camouflaged and rooted in a genealogy of national power, which currently acts as the patron of some of Spain’s institutions and has been enriched by colonies and slavery. And above all, the question of coloniality implies interrupting them with policies of reparation and strategies of recognition, representation, healing, and re-signification of migrant bodies.

As stated, the intense debates and activity around coloniality in Spain have taken place mainly outside the academy. The involvement of Spanish universities in creating strategies to engage with coloniality has been very limited. For example, the reform of the curriculum from a postcolonial perspective still remains to be undertaken. Nevertheless, I would like to emphasize that the public programs of the main museums and art centers, located in major cities and in the provinces, have played a very important and active role in the commitment to generate numerous spaces of reflection for art collectives and activist groups. While it is true that in most cases these public programs have supported identity-based projects, the last decade has seen exhibitions, festivals, study groups, and a very active cultural scene.⁵ 2012 saw the founding of the independent research group Península. Colonial processes and artistic and curatorial practices. This group, linked to the Reina Sofía Museum, aimed at creating a network of artists, activists, curators, and academics working from a postcolonial perspective, counting about thirty members. Many of them had been working on their curatorial or research projects for a long time, without necessarily following the Anglo-Saxon school of thought. It is very interesting to see that their exhibitions or public events organized prior to 2012 took place mostly within the framework of official celebrations related to colonial history rather than as part of an articulated and sustainable institutional program.⁶ For example, the exhibition Filipiniana, curated by Juan Guardiola with backing from the Ministry of Culture in 2006, commemorated Spanish-Philippine relations. Projects by non-members of the group, such as Mar Villaespesa’s exhibition Plus Ultra (part of Seville Expo 1992) marked the 500^th anniversary of the so-called “Discovery” of America, and Jorge Luis Marzo’s curated exhibition Defecto Barroco Politics of the Hispanic Image (Barcelona, CCBB, 2010) marked the bicentenary of Latin American Independence. But the joint activity of the Península group lasted only two years, and I suggest two main reasons for its brief existence: on the one hand, the lack of consistent institutional support from the Reina Sofía Museum, and on the other, the need of some Latin American members to differentiate between Spanish and non-Spanish researchers, that is, based on an internal Spanish colonialism.⁷ In that decade it became clear that coloniality was not only present in the former colonies, but that colonial power relations continue to be reproduced in postcolonial Europe.⁸

In the following years the situation between Spanish scholars and working groups entirely made up by foreign intellectuals became increasingly antagonistic. The latter formed research projects with institutional support. Art institutions thus represented a fundamental catalysts for changing perspectives that the academic field had been slow to create.⁹ But other perspectives coexisted with difficulty: by 2009 Boaventura de Sousa Santos was already pointing to a differentiation between northern Europe and the South, starting with the derogatory acronym PIGS referring to Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain, whose identities contained a history of subordination, slavery, and other types of racializations as yet to be named.¹⁰ When this discussion reached the Spanish art scene half a decade later, racialized working groups criticized it as an appropriation of postcolonial theories by South European thinkers. They upheld the idea of Spain as a univocally oppressive framework for immigrants, but disregarded the fact that Spain itself was also exposed to a range of subordinations within Europe and the ‘global north’. This polarization has slowed down the development of theoretical discourse, the generation of knowledge, and our capacity to understand the complex strategies of colonial power in depth.¹¹

In the midst of this antagonistic context, a third position was given regarding the interpretation of postcolonial theories in Spain. In 2017 Helena Miguélez-Carballeira held a meeting at the University of Bangor entitled: Postcolonial Spain? Contexts, Politics, Cultural Practices,¹² which, to the surprise of the well-known participants in the previous debate, attracted many researchers interested in Spanish self-governed regions and internal colonialism as understood by Robert Lafont in 1968.¹³ The parallels and dialogs between these fields of work have been growing, and today there is increasing interest in crossing postcolonial methodologies with the problems surrounding autonomy and self-determination. At the same time and also in this decade, projects relating to Romany representations represent a fourth entry into the postcolonial field. These studies have been consolidated in Spain and at a European level, but are strikingly independent and isolated from the abovementioned debates, showing new hierarchical layers in public debates and revealing the limitations of postcolonial debates and the art field.¹⁴ Alongside these positions, two other issues have become urgent in recent years: ecology (which in Spanish debates has not been particularly linked to postcolonial debates) and social class. Integrating social class into postcolonial debates implies making complex the mobile, multidirectional, and geographically changing nature of colonial power relations. The outcomes of the inclusion of these “new and old” issues are still uncertain. This special issue of Art in Translation aspires to contribute to tackling some of these issues in the Spanish twentieth-century context. It aims to broadening the map of intersecting colonial power relations from a historical perspective, in which no level of debate denies a previous one and which helps to create an even field of knowledge.¹⁵

Towards an Ecology of Knowledges

In my opinion, the postcolonial debate, as outlined above, has also revealed a crisis of the discourse as an apparatus and the role of intellectuals. They can no longer be seen as “articulating figures” but rather as participants in a complex collective learning project, in which it will be fundamental to recognize the uncertainty and instability of our epistemology. Homi Bhabha, in his foundational text The Location of Culture (1994) repeatedly addresses the great difficulty of the West in dealing with the uncertainties created by the colonial encounter. Roland Barthes expressed it by speaking of the “outside-the-text” in the streets of Morocco that evokes the unrepresentable and unspeakable, that which cannot be contained in any known text.¹⁶ Spivak appropriated the term catachresis to address this issue;¹⁷ it will therefore be important to understand how these uncertainties and opacities are constructed, what the resilience of our epistemology is and how we can think politically to deal with them.

Thinking precisely about how to “think politically” in a previously published text, I reflected on the way in which Latin American postcolonial theories developed during the 1990s.¹⁸ They were inspired by a genealogy of revolutionary macropolitical thought during the Latin American dictatorships, and in turn they inspired many of the current debates and authors (Walter Mignolo, Santiago Castro Gómez, Ramón Grosfoguel, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, etc). The efforts made in the 1990s focused on mapping Latin American twentieth-century thought in order to place it in a cartography of postcolonial thinking and, at the same time, on creating “new” concepts in order to generate a common political language: decolonial turn, borderline thinking, epistemic violence, etc. This has enabled us to acquire very quickly a language of political action, which in the case of Spain has been eloquently articulated within the already politicized artistic scene. But I am not sure that the framework of direct action that has characterized these debates has generated the necessary space for embracing the fragility that any learning process implies, nor for assuming the responsibility of understanding a complex map with different components, which act ambivalently and carry a double meaning. Denunciation, which should be the starting point of any study, has almost always been a point of arrival, giving priority to the urgencies of political action. Taking it as a starting point, however, would mean understanding more deeply the genealogy of apparatuses that camouflage coloniality as a process of self-knowledge in order, in turn, to create new knowledge, to understand the connivances of our institutions and our “ways of knowing” with coloniality, to welcome the contradictions, and to learn from our vulnerabilities; in short, to assume the instability and fragility of Western theory, something that this action-focused framework of thought, made up of certainties and fixations, disregards and often penalizes in the name of political certainties. In short, I would like to defend the claim that both spheres, that of direct action and the academic one, should be supported in an ecology of knowledges (Sousa Santos, 2009) to maintain their agency, without one sphere suffocating or subordinating the other, as I believe is happening at the moment.

Considering the lack of spaces and policies for the development of postcolonial perspectives in Spanish academia, this issue of Art in Translation aims to widen the debates about postcoloniality in art and visual culture framed by Francoism. It reveals how a genealogy of power still resonates in current Spanish relations with migrant bodies and their diverse regimes of sub-citizenship. It is my conviction that without a historical revision of both this genealogy of colonial power and its relationship to images, it will be impossible to disarticulate it completely. In the history of their formation and consolidation we will understand their roots and the allies that still keep them active today.

Modernity and Ambivalence

As the six texts in this issue show, Spain is situated in an ambivalent space, which has prevented it from generating a clear position with respect to coloniality, and which also reflects its ambivalent relationship with Modernity. As described by Frederick Cooper in 2005, Modernity has thus far been defined on the basis of four positions: 1. Celebratory: a triumphalist imperialist discourse 2. Harmful: as the visible face of a colonizing misfortune 3. Unreachable: as a great achievement inaccessible and undeserved by non-rich countries, condemned to the catching-up of Modernity 4. Multiple: as a process of parallel Modernities that occur in different ways in different contexts, but each with its own peculiarities and therefore not to be called mere copies.¹⁹ Spain is situated in all these places at once. Its situation is linked to the country’s identity crisis following the so-called “Disaster of ‘98”: the loss of the colonies of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba in the war against the United States, a crisis from which Spain has never recovered. Cuba was one of the last countries to abolish slavery and (since anti-slavery and independence went hand in hand) Cuba was also one of the last to become independent. In reality Spain’s power in Cuba had already began to wane in the early nineteenth century, but the maintenance of Cuba as a colony served to generate an illusion of Spanish hegemony. Its loss in 1898 therefore initiated a major national crisis that exposed the definitive lack of Spanish hegemony.

The articles in this issue seek to reveal Spain’s ambivalent place in the twentieth century: on the one hand, Spain, as an undervalued region in Southern Europe, was touristicized in response to European aspirations for a primitive, nostalgic experience of underdevelopment, as Alicia Fuentes indicates. On the other hand, Spain was also considered by dissidents to the dictatorship as a “colony of the United States” and as a victim in ecological disasters in Andalusian areas, as Cécile Stehrenberger demonstrates very clearly. This was made possible by Franco’s internal colonialism towards rural areas, which is evident in the very nature of the institutions that administered them, one of them called El Instituto Nacional de la Colonización (National Institute of Colonization). Two texts, one by Rafael Sánchez and the other by Cécile Stehrenberger, show the link between Franco’s repressive fury directed against rural areas and the anti-exploitation movement that led many farmers to claim ownership of the land they worked. In addition to this internal colonialism towards the south of Spain, Rafael Sánchez Mateos considers the issues of social class and proletarianization around the explosives company Maxam. This company created a collection of images made by artists for their annual calendars, which circulated widely and became part of the popular imagination.

On the other hand, internationally, Spain’s imperialist discourse can still be felt today. This is evident in the speeches of Spain’s National Museums, as Esther Gabara’s essay shows; or as Jorge Luis Marzo explains, in the defense of Spanish mid-twentieth-century art, framed by Spanish theorists in terms of the Baroque and transcendentality. At the same time, the dictatorship maintained a last colony in West Africa: Inés Plasencia discusses the important role of images to the regimes of sub-citizenships created in Equatorial Guinea until independence. These strategies have their echo in today’s migratory policies.

The issue opens with Esther Gabara’s text, exploring the administration of colonial memory in what she calls “the Bermuda Triangle,” located between three institutions in Madrid: the Prado Museum, the Museum of Anthropology, and the Museum of America. The first ignores the link between our Modernity and colonization; the second comes to celebrate the help the Spaniards gave to the Indians during the conquest; while the third, located on the outskirts of the city, is divided between a triumphalist vision of the achievements of colonization and scientific anthropology. Gabara’s focus is on showing how works related to colonization have been relegated to this museum, as they are not considered artistic masterpieces, like the ones in the Prado, but minor artworks. This approach has made it possible for our most important museum to avoid the bitter aftertaste of colonization. Likewise, Gabara raises questions about the continuity of colonial gestures and the cultural promotion of “Latin American art” by entities such as El Banco Santander or the ARCO fair, and wonders if these artworks will be considered as “minor pieces” like the ones housed by the Museum of America, which were also made by Latin American artists. This institution opened its doors in 1941, gathering art and artefacts that until then had been kept in the National Archaeological Museum. Franco presented the Museum of America as Europe’s only museum dedicated on Latin America, an expression of his claim to leadership in a European context. As we have seen, this strategy has continued in our time.

Jorge Luis Marzo’s text, like Gabara’s, also thinks about the discourses of national legitimacy around art in Modernity, to show how concepts that have been fundamental to Spanish imperialism (the Baroque, timeless national-religious transcendence, and existentialism) were used to defend the greatness of national artistic movements. These elements situated Spanish art outside and inside Modernity, as the Baroque was “considered an attitude of overcoming its traps”; but at the same time this concept was a fundamental piece of the culturalization in the Latin American colony and therefore allowed Francoism to continue maintaining the discourse of union between religion and state, between war and manifest destiny, in short, to keep alive the essence of Spanish imperialism.

Alicia Fuentes shows in detail how Spanish old master paintings were used to illustrate poverty as a tourist attraction in Spain. European tourists were looking mainly for an experience of Spanish underdevelopment and primitivism, turning to paintings of Goya or Velázquez to create a picturesque image of post-war misery. It is interesting how Fuentes, in order to talk about the tourist experience in Spain, turns to Johannes Fabian, the anthropologist who has convincingly shown anthropological writing relegates ethnic objects of study to past times, denying them an existence that is contemporaneous with their own culture. The most effective tools of coloniality were precisely the timeless stereotypes and the ambivalent relationships of rejection and desire that these generated. But at the same time, timelessness also belongs to the national icons indicated by Gabara or Marzo.

Rafael Sánchez Mateos looks at a body of widely circulated images, commissioned from artists by the explosives company Maxam Group from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. Focusing especially on female representation, he analyzes how this imagery developed stereotypes of “explosive women” as a metaphor for their mostly female workers, while also tracing the history of the prosperity of this company from the First World War to more recent interventions in Afghanistan and Syria.

Inés Plasencia’s text is an important hinge for thinking about Spain’s role as a colonizer. The text discusses the fundamental role of images in the construction of an idea of citizenship in Equatorial Guinea until its independence; and how these images supported Spain’s attempt to represent a normality that hid not only colonial violence, but also the Guineans’ expectations of Spanish citizenship. Inés Plasencia explains, on the one hand, the political evolution of the relationship between Spain and its former colony and, on the other hand, the function and circulation of photography accompanying this process. The idea of Spain as a colonizing country often persists in the Bermuda Triangle of the above-mentioned debates. Inés Plasencia’s work reveals how the old colonial strategy continues to exist within the academy in Spain, in which it is possible to generate a history of the Franco regime without considering its colonies. Yet, it is impossible to talk about the colonies without explaining the Franco regime.

Cécile Stehrenberger’s essay is very important because it shows the ambivalent position of Spain as a colonial force and a colonized entity, and at the same time it highlights a fundamental perspective for postcolonial theory—the ecological disaster. Her essay helps to understand another dimension of the double affiliation: the ecological disaster of the North American air base of Palomares stimulated anti-American attitudes, which denounced the way in which Spain was transforming itself into an “American colony”; at the same time, the use of Guinea as a space to deposit toxic residues from the “First World” during the 1980s is nothing but a consequence of Spain’s colonial work during the Franco regime. Stehrenberger shows that the arguments used in the 1980s to justify ecological disasters, involving dangerous waste dumps in other countries, were the same arguments used in Franco’s Spain in the face of the Palomares disaster in 1966.

Finally, I would like to add that the starting point for this issue was a symposium, held in the School of History of Art at the University of Edinburgh in 2018, entitled “Performing Otherness: a Postcolonial Approach to Francoist Spain” in the frame of the Research and Development project “Experience of Politics during Francoism.” Co-organized with Claudia Hopkins at the University of Edinburgh, this brought together a number of researchers from Spain and the UK, including Helena Miguélez-Carballeira (Bangor University), José Saval (University of Edinburgh), Neil Cox (University of Edinburgh), Esther Planas (Kingston University), Alicia Fuentes (Complutense University of Madrid), Carles Prado-Fonts (Open University of Catalonia), and Claudia Hopkins (University of Edinburgh).

María Iñigo Clavo, Guest-Editor

María Íñigo Clavo
[email protected]

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to my fellow debaters for their contributions to this text, for which I have received much help: Olga Fernández, Inés Plasencia, Pau Cata, Julia Ramírez, Suset Sánchez, Nancy Garín, Martina Moora Millà, Carles Prado, Kristina Keall and Claudia Hopkins. This work is done in the framework of the research project “Experiences of the Politics During Francoism” (HAR2017-82655-P), and “Mode(s) 2: Decentralized Modernities: Politics Counterculture and Art in the Transaltlantic Exis During the Cold War” (HAR2017-82755-P), both funded by the Spanish Government.

Notes

1 See Daniela Ortiz, “La Cultura de la Colonialidad,” in Decolonizing Museums (L’international online, 2015).

2 The exhibition Principio Potosí, 2010, Reina Sofía Museum, was held in the year of the celebrations of the Bicentennial of Latin American Independence, which in Spain went almost unnoticed, contrasting with the ostentatious celebrations of the 1992 500th anniversary of the evil called “The Age of Discovery”. At the MACBA the exhibition Indefinite Territories. Perspectives on Colonial Legacies in 2019 was the first of its exhibitions. The Museum also presented solo exhibitions of authors working on colonial issues but not collective exhibitions creating a narration. For this year (2020), the Museum has programmed the exhibition Trilogía marroquí. Arte y cultura en Marruecos, 1955–2010. The IVAM Center of Valencia is currently exhibiting the show Orientalism. The Construction of Images of the Near East and of North Africa (1800-1956).

3 A major curatorial project that initiated this strategy was Versiones del Sur (2000), with several exhibitions held at the Museum, most of them curated by Latin American authors. This is also important to the role of the market and ARCO as one of the mediators in this special focus on “Latin America Art field”.

4 Ramiro De Maeztu, Defensa de la Hispanidad (Madrid: Gráfica Universal, 1941; first edition 1934).

5 A chronological list of all of them in the last two decades, in parallel with some important moments in the creation of migratory laws, can be found in the text by Olga Fernández “Curatorial displacements in Spain before and after the 2000s: Coloniality tricks, exhibition eclipses and critical agencies,” in Curating and Coloniality in Contemporary Iberia, ed. Carlos Garrido (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2021). However, I do not entirely agree with some aspects of this genealogy or others that have identified thinking from a postcolonial perspective with talking about “Latin American art” or exhibitions with a “Latin American” focus. The fact that they can be read from a postcolonial perspective has often been confused with the fact that they think about coloniality.

6 Another example is Jorge Luis Marzo’s El corazón de las tinieblas (2002) in Barcelona celebrating the centenary of Conrad’s book.

7 According to Olga Fernández’s text some exhibitions that can be considered as resonances of the group are Critique of the Migrant Reason in Casa Encendida, Colonia Apocrifa. Images of Coloniality in Spain in MUSAC (León), and Rumor… Decolonial Stories in the “la Caixa” Collection in Barcelona. See Fernández, “Curatorial displacements.”

8 For the concept of internal colonialism, see Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores. 1st ed. (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2010). In Spain some exhibitions and art projects have addressed immigration since the 1990s, for example, Almadraba (1997) in Andalusia curated by Mar Villaespesa and Corrine Diserens, or Ninguna persona es ilegal (No person is ilegal) at the Casa Encendida, Madrid, 2002 curated by Paloma Blanco.

9 Fernández’ text mentions the exhibition here as All Shades of Anger. Poetics and Politics of Anti-Racism at MUSAC (León, 2018) curated by Francisco Godoy Vega or projects at institutions such as Matadero Madrid, TabaKalera in Madrid, Tic. Tac in Barcelona. To her list I would add several public programs carried out by the MACBA of collectives that work from the politics of identity. The subject has been very frequently addressed through solo exhibitions of important representatives of the debate, for example in La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona with the solo exhibition of Daniela Ortiz, Esta tierra jamás será fértil por haber parido colonos (This land will never be fertile as it has given birth to settlers), Los bárbaros (The Barbarians) by Rogelio López Cuenca at the Sala Alcalá in Madrid, Kader Attia and Mona Hatoum in the Miró Foundation or Ariella Azoulay in the Tàpies Foundation. A center that committed to a narrative early on was the Museo de Arte de Andalucía with many exhibitions, such as Mil bestias que rugen (A Thousand Roaring Beasts) in 2017, as one of its most innovative examples.

10 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Una epistemología del sur: la reinvención del conocimiento y la emancipación social (Buenos Aires: Clacso, 2009).

11 Outside the art field there are good efforts in Spanish scholarship on Morocco that is informed by postcolonial theory. See the many publications by José Antonio González Alcantud, such as Racismo Elegante: de la teoría de las razas culturales a la invisibilidad del racism cotidiano (Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 2011), Orientalismo desde el sur (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2006) and other volumes. Also note the exhibition Ikunde Barcelona, Metropoli Colonial, 2016–2017, Museo de Cultures del Mon, and the book Javier García Fernández, Descolonizar Europa (Madrid: Brumaria, 2020).

12 https://www.bangor.ac.uk/arts-humanities-and-business/events/postcolonial-spain-contexts-politics-cultural-practices-32480

13 The concept of “internal colonialism” was popularized by Robert Lafont and Jacques Madaule in their book Sur La France (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).

14 María Sierra (Universidad de Sevilla), Proyecto HERA: Beyond Stereotypes: Cultural Exchanges and the Romani Contribution to European Public Spaces (BESTROM). At the Fundación Tàpies in Barcelona Joana Masó organized public Programs on Romany community in 2018. CentroCentro in Madrid organized the exhibition on Romany culture Akathe te Beshen, Sastipen Thaj Mestepen in 2016. Artists Rogelio López Cuenca and Elo Vega presented Gitanos de Papel, an exhibition at Cajasol, Jerez de la Frontera, in 2009. Internationally well-known artists such as Pedro G. Romero work on flamenco and the history of Romani society in the twentieth century. An important exhibition in the Virreina Centre of Image in Barcelona is Máquinas de vivir: Flamenco y arquitecturas de la ocupación y desocupación de espacios (Living Machines: Flamenco and Architecture in the Occupation and Unoccupation of Spaces) curated by Maria Ruiz and Pedro G. Romero in 2012. See also Inés Plasencia, “Visualidad gitana: una perspectiva transnacional,” Bostezo Magazine 10 (2014): 52–4.

15 It has not been possible to incorporate the theme of Roma representations in the symposium organized prior to the publication of this issue, although attempts have been made at various times. On the other hand, this issue focuses on the Francoist period and therefore does not include topics relating to the migrations of the last three decades.

16 Roland Barthes and Severo Sarduy, as well as Michel Foucault or Jean Genet are known for their trips to Morroco where they found a space of freedom. Barthes reflects on one of these trips in his book Le Plaisir du Texte (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973).

17 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Post-Structuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality and Value,” in Literary Theory Today, eds. Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).

18 María Iñigo Clavo, “Epistemic Diversity,” in Glossary of Common Knowledge. L’international online, 2010 http://glossary.mg-lj.si/referential-fields/epistemic-diversity/epistemic-diversity

19 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University California Press, 2005).