Non-violent Cultural Resistance as Visual Representations of Peace : The Non-official Representation of Spain at the 1976 Venice Biennale

Abstract

In 1976, the Venice Biennale, a point of reference in the world of international art, opened to the world with one of its national pavilions closed. Since the start of the Civil War, the official Spanish pavilion had been used systematically to spread propaganda about the Francoist regime. However, the newly appointed director of the Biennale, Carlo Ripa di Mena, refused to open the doors of the Spanish pavilion. His aim was to denounce the situation of those countries that surrendered to a dictatorial system. Instead, a non-official commission was designated to curate pieces created throughout the forty years of antifascist resistance, bring them together for the first time. The exhibition was titled “Spain. The Artistic Avant-garde and Social Reality, 1936–1976”. The present study revisits the referred to 1976 non-official exhibition introduced by the representation of Spain with the objective to analyze and discuss the ways and means that the visual arts exhibited, in conjunction with the institution of the Venice Biennale, creates a nonviolent form of antifascist resistance to the Spanish dictatorship. This study aims to offer insight into how different meanings of peace and nonviolence are created and reimagined through art history; where peaceful experiences, despite being prevalent, have been generally marginalized. The approaches used to understand the non- violent character of the exhibition are 1) Judith Butler’s discussion on non-violence as a form of resistance, and aggression as a force of change essential to make a difference in resisting violence; 2) Stephen Duncombe’s cultural resistance that proposes the exploration of ‘free zones’ and spaces where future imagination takes place within the exhibition. This research employs critical visual methodologies to explore the compositional interpretation and visual semiotics of nonviolent resistance in the visual arts of artists such as Juan Genovés, or Equipo Crónica. Furthermore, it looks at the social circumstances where the artwork was exhibited by understanding the space and the institution of the 1976 Venice Biennale as carriers of ideological connotation and political significance that contributed to meaning creation. Scholars have suggested that while photography enables us to portray the reality of the world as it is, fine arts open the possibilities for imagining new realities with a focus on how we wish the world to be. Yet, the intersection between fine arts and peace research is a generally unexplored space, a gap to which this research aims to contribute towards. The exhibition and subsequent interpretation of it suggest that nonviolence becomes an element not just ‘against’ but ‘for’ a new vision of a transitioning Spanish society. Likewise, it poses critical questions about the possibilities of the visual representation of peace.