After launching in 2011 – in the midst of the 15M hangover – The 70s by piecePepe Ribas (Barcelona, 1951) now returns with new memories of a time as fascinating as it is unjustly forgotten. Even in Barcelona, which was the city that capitalized on it. This is the libertarian explosion that took place between 1976 and 1977 and that began to manifest itself at the end of the 60s.
Under the title of Angels dancing on the head of a pin (Libros del KO, 2024), Ribas recounts the events that accompanied the creation of his life’s work: Ajoblanco. It was this magazine, along with another seminal publication called Star, that was the backbone of the countercultural response in Spain in a time of changes that were as rapid as they were profound.
Additionally, as Ribas claims in conversation with elDiario.es, Ajoblanco gave voice for the first time to avenues of thought as important as environmentalism, radical feminism or the demand for LGTBI rights. “For five months in 1977 we had circulations of 100,000 copies, and the rest of the months we reached 50,000,” boasts the founder of the publication.
The fast hours of the Spanish counterculture
The narrative tempo of Angels dancing on the head of a pin remember sometimes to the of When the hours rush (Tusquets Editores), the memoirs that Carlos Barral wrote about his experience in the 60s and 70s at the head of the Seix Barral publishing house. Both books have a devilish rhythm that transmits to the reader the feeling of being trapped in a gale of events that will determine the future of the country.
And this feeling increases when we realize that its authors confess to us that they let themselves be carried away by said gale, becoming protagonists of those fascinating times. “There is a lot of talk about Carmen Balcells as the center of the publishing revolution that took place in Barcelona in the 70s, but the real driving force was Barral,” says Ribas regarding the importance of the editor compared to the one who was García Márquez’s literary agent and Vargas Llosa.
He also explains that the book California Trip, which María José Ragué published in 1971, was the first guide on counterculture for a generation that, she claims, “grew up on myths but without teachers,” since their ideological link with the past had been severed by the Civil War. However, Ribas recognizes in the text the weight of the writer Luis Racionero – who was Ragué’s first companion – as an intellectual mentor of that generation.
A call to mobilization for the new generations
Ribas recounts the chain of events that pushed him to write Angels dancing on the head of a pin. “First of all, there is the success of the exhibition Underground and counterculture in Catalonia in the ’70sof which I am curator and which, after being at the Palau Robert in Barcelona, travels to Madrid at the end of 2021.”
That exhibition, he says, made many young people aware of the existence of a counterculture that they were completely unaware of and that surprised them “because it had been conveniently covered up by the system.” “It is in this context,” he continues, “that Libros del KO proposes that I write about those years, especially about the libertarian explosion that took place between 1976 and 1977 and that culminated in the International Libertarian Days of June 1977.”
But finally Angels dancing on the head of a pin covers the entire first stage of Ajoblanco, since 1973. The reason, as clarified by its founder, is that “he wanted to make a book that could reach today’s youth and motivate them to take control of their lives and organize themselves to create an alternative society and libertarian.”
“Given current expectations, they have nothing to lose,” agrees Ribas, who adds: “I would like this book to encourage them to leave their current situation, go live together in shared apartments, be supportive and dedicate themselves to creation.” of theater and culture from the margins.” Because for him true culture, not commercial culture, “is created from the independence of the margins, not under the influence of capitalism.”
Ribas concludes by assuring that his proposal is not a dead letter, that he feels that something is moving beneath the substratum of the system: “There are already numerous groups questioning the system and working in this sense throughout the State, from Catalonia to Extremadura.”
A libertarian agora in the midst of Franco’s regime
“Now we live in a permanent linearity,” Ribas says and explains: “Today the rains were [en València]Before it was the volcano [en la Palma] or the Lorca earthquake and much earlier the 15M, but these events today provide very little social transformation, we continue in a capitalist linearity that takes us where it takes us…”. He wants to highlight the difference with late Francoism and the Transition where, as he says in the book, a fundamental change could occur every month.
Immediately, he clarifies: “The 15M was a very hopeful demand for libertarianism and direct democracy, but unfortunately it ended up capitalized by some parties that channeled the movement towards the system of representative democracy against which they were precisely fighting.” He points out Podemos in particular, because “it presents a very marked hierarchical structure.”
He then claims that Ajoblanco was a space not only for libertarian voices, but also for other forms of thought: “That was full of Marxists although I was a libertarian.” “We had to dialogue with the situationists, with the anarchists, with the Marxists,” he adds and boasts that “in the second Ajoblanco, practically all the new culture of the 80s and 90s wrote there.”
Barcelona was abuzz
“Barcelona was the cultural capital of Spain in the 70s and was until the 80s,” says Ribas. “Here were the publishing houses, the record companies, the advertising agencies, the experimental theater,” he says and also highlights “the recovery of the popular Mediterranean festivals after the Civil War, Els Comediants, Els Joglars, etc.”
He adds film directors like Pere Portabella, or architects like Ricardo Bofill, to the cast of restless characters who stood out in a Spain that in cultural terms was a wasteland: “Of course there were groups in Madrid, Seville, Bilbao, Valencia and other cities, but they were comparatively fewer people.” The book highlights Ceesepe from Madrid and Javier Valenzuela and Amadeu Fabregat from Valencia, who participated in writing the dossier on the Fallas that caused the closure of Ajoblanco in 1976.
However, as Ribas recognizes, after the culmination of the International Libertarian Days of June 1977, all that effervescence ended up dissipating surprisingly quickly. “Several things happened,” Ribas responds to try to explain that fainting. “Many people from the libertarian movement moved to the rural environment,” he reveals.
He also mentions heroin, which did not affect his generation but did affect the following ones, leaving the movement without continuity. He adds that the development of nationalism, which supported only Catalan, made many artists and cultural managers move to Madrid, which was awakening.
“In any case,” he warns, “unlike what happened in the countercultural Barcelona of the 70s, the culture of Madrid in the 80s [la movida madrileña] “It was a subsidized culture.” And he closes the conversation by lamenting that “we have ended up with two cities, Madrid and Barcelona, that instead of collaborating as they did in the 70s, are blatantly competing.”
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