It was Spain

Name: It was Spain
Start: 2016-11-18 00:00:00
End: 2017-02-19 00:00:00
Location: Museum of the History of Catalonia

Museum of the History of Catalonia

Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Curated by: Daniela Aronica e Andrea Di Michele

The show

The exhibition " Fu la Spagna " was inaugurated on November 18, 2016 and was active until February 19, 2017 at the Museu d'Historia de Catalunya.

Mussolini's support for Franco and the coup insurrection were crucial to the success of the Spanish Civil War . The fascist regime sent airplanes, ships, weapons and more than eighty thousand soldiers. Most of these, over time, were assigned to the group that would be formed for the occasion, the Voluntary Troops Corps (CTV), also formed by Blackshirts. On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the conflict, this exhibition shows, together for the first time, images from the most diverse sources of how the intervention of fascist Italy was represented.

The exhibition, which is the result of a long search among archives and libraries, has led to the identification of about twenty thousand images , of which three hundred are visible in the sample, classified into three types, each marked with a different color. On the one hand, the photographs that appeared in the Italian illustrated press (in green); to follow, the photographs taken by individual legionaries (in white) and, finally, the photographs taken and kept in various political-military institutions (in red). The result are the three colors of the Italian flag , but, above all, it is a dialectical construction of the various visions, capable of giving us an articulated image of the ways in which the war was seen, and of how it was represented by propaganda machines, military and institutions. Italian. Three glances that do not always coincide and that, when compared, allow us to re-emerge from them, revealing absences and presences. In the choice of images, in the first place, we based on their representativeness, but without neglecting also the aesthetic quality.

The photographic narrative follows two parallel and complementary paths, one warlike and the other thematic . The first focuses on the various phases of the war , with particular attention to the role played by the Italian military intervention , while the second proposes some of the most recurring themes of the fascist representation of the war . A third exhibition space interrupts the thematic itinerary and offers an in-depth view of the work carried out by the Italian media active in Spanish territory , generators to a large extent of the representation, not only iconographic, that Fascist Italy offered of the conflict.

Exhibition organized by the Museum of the History of Catalonia in collaboration with the Center for Studies on Italian Cinema .