La Plaza de Catalunya, Barcelona, el día del primer desfile del Ejército Popular. Caricaturas de Hitler, Franco y Mussolini (Plaza de Catalunya, Barcelona, on the Day of the First March of the Popular Army. Caricatures of Hitler, Franco and Mussolini)

In 2018, the descendants of Antoni Campañà came across two red boxes containing over five thousand photographs the Catalan photographer took during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Among them was the series El expreso antifascista (The Anti-Fascist Express) and a handful of images documenting a Republican Army march in Barcelona.

The photographs convey the revolutionary atmosphere of Barcelona’s Plaza de Cataluña, and the employment of three figures as effigies of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini. Depicted in a caricature-like fashion, akin to the Fallas of Valencia, the figures express a satirical and humour-laced vocabulary to mock the three dictators, in contrast to the posters of Lenin and Stalin which emblazoned the façade of the defunct Hotel Colón. In this instance, the posters and banners as ephemeral constructions situated in public space are part of agitprop, namely the Soviet-affiliated strategies of disturbance and propaganda which the Republican faction set in motion to mobilise the population in the anti-fascist struggle.



Celia Cuenca