These comrades have left us an important historical document of great
artistic value. Both show us the achievements of a revolution that wasdismantled, the hope and defeat of ordinary people in their struggle to
change the world ---- A few months ago, I read a small, very interesting
book about the anarchist Sanabria of the 1930s, written by Carlos Coca
Durán. I was struck by the account of an event in April 1936 in Requejo
de Sanabria. The parish priest, together with the former mayor and four
other neighbours, placed a bomb in the Casa del Pueblo, which was used
by both UGT and CNT members. Faced with this event, the CNT members
declared a protest strike against such savagery and decided to take over
the temple-hermitage of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Requejo to establish
the union headquarters there. This fact, which was published by the
official and libertarian press of the time, shows us the level of
revolutionary consciousness of the people of a small town in Zamora and
the imaginative initiative to respond to the terrorist attack of the
town's reactionaries.
Well, this mentality, this imagination, this breaking of molds and
demonstrating what a people is capable of when it has class
consciousness is what is shown to us in the photographs of the
exhibition The Boxes of Amsterdam: Margaret Michaelis and Kati Horna,
two great libertarian photographers, one Polish and the other Hungarian,
born in 1902 and the other in 1912, both from wealthy Jewish families.
Both passed through Berlin and Paris at the end of the hard years of the
20s and early 30s, they were imbued with the avant-garde ideas of the
time by having contact with members of the Bauhaus (that factory of
ideas in architecture, design, crafts and art founded in 1919 and later
closed by the Nazis) and with the surrealists later. And, as it could
not be otherwise, in those years of great revolutionary fervor, although
for different reasons and on different dates, they ended up settling in
anarchist Barcelona. The first one did so in December 1933 fleeing from
Nazi persecution, the second in January 1937 when the libertarian
revolution began to crumble as a consequence of the Stalinist repression
of the PCE.
Margaret, for almost three years, worked in Barcelona as a professional
photographer for GATEPAC (Group of Spanish Artists and Technicians for
the Progress of Contemporary Architecture) in collaboration with
architects such as Josep Lluis Sert and Josep Torres Clavé. When the
events of July 19, 1936 occurred, she put herself at the service of the
CNT and the FAI with the intention of showing the world, with her
photographs, the effects produced in the places where the Revolution
triumphed and the normality with which it was lived. He captures the
daily life of a city without war, children playing in the streets,
people having an aperitif, workers working in their workshops... But
something else is glimpsed: the city functions without authorities,
there are no bankers or businessmen because the revolution has made them
dispensable; the people are self-sufficient. He uses the technique of
high and low angle shots: people are not posing, they are absorbed in
their tasks or activities. Among the photos in the exhibition there is
one taken of "the most dangerous person in the USA", Emma Goldman, whom
he accompanied on her first trip through the Collectivities of Aragon.
He portrays her with an exultant and heroic face, happy to see the
effects of the libertarian Revolution. He also photographed Durruti's
funeral, always using the technique of high angle shots from the top of
a building showing the street packed with people; he will make a whole
photomontage for the magazine Umbral.
In 1937 he left the country and, after a short period of time in Poland,
he fled from another war that seemed to be brewing, emigrating in
September 1939 to Australia where he opened a new photography studio
until in 1952 he put an end to his career due to vision problems. He
died in Melbourne in 1985.
Kati Horna, a self-described "worker photographer", a feminist and
libertarian like Margaret Michaelis, came with the idea of bearing
witness to the transformation that the CNT and the working class were
carrying out: collectives, occupation of companies, churches and
buildings that speak of a profound change and not a simple reform of the
State. Her photographs do not focus on war exploits, but on the feelings
and intimacy of the characters portrayed. In her photographs, these
characters, if they are posing, feel like protagonists. She also
photographed Emma Goldman on her second visit to Spain, although she is
no longer the Emma that Margaret shows us. She appears aged and pensive,
sitting in an armchair, as if predicting the end of the Revolution. With
her camera she captured the events of May 1937, a new popular revolution
that was harshly repressed this time by the government of the Republic
and the Generalitat, who feared the strength of the workers more than
the coup plotters themselves.
In 1939, together with her partner José Horna, she went into exile in
Paris and from there to Mexico, where she met artists and intellectuals,
Spanish and German, who lived in exile. She died in 2000 in Mexico City.
These companions, predecessors of the reporters who would cover the
successive wars of the 20th century, left us an important historical
document of great artistic value. Both show us the achievements of a
revolution that was dismantled, the hope and defeat of ordinary people
in their struggle to change the world against the threat posed by
European fascism.
These funds, which some thought had been lost when they fell into
Francoist hands or disappeared among the ruins of the bombings of
Barcelona, were saved thanks to the commitment, wisdom and
responsibility of those anarchist comrades from the CNT and the FAI who,
despite the defeat, understood the importance of preserving a memory
that was the foundation of their existence. We must thank them for the
work of rescuing, packing and transporting 48 boxes through a Europe
dominated by Mussolini's fascism and Hitler's Nazism.
After the Second World War, all the documentation from the CNT-FAI
archives was deposited at the International Institute of Social History
(IISG) in Amsterdam. For more than sixty years, many of these boxes
remained unopened until, in 2016, the historian Almudena Rubio, a
researcher at the IISG, began to organize its funds and create and
publish its inventory.
This is my look at the exhibition that has been in Valladolid, and I
hope that the 6,433 people who, according to the Municipal Foundation
for Culture, have visited it have understood it this way.
The exhibition is included in the program of the International Festival
of Photography and Visual Arts PHotoESPAÑA; sponsored by various
international entities, the Ministry of Culture, various city councils,
museums, companies such as El Corte Inglés, Telefónica, Macdonals, DKV,
Loewe, ...
FHotoESPAÑA contacted the Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation at the beginning of
2020, and the possibility of promoting our ideas was positively valued.
A presentation of the project was made at the Foundation's headquarters
in Madrid. They signed an agreement for this purpose.
I wonder, is it convenient to do things with these people? Do we really
spread our ideology like this? My personal opinion is contrary because
it is slipping out of our hands, we have no control over it. We should
not leave our legacy in the hands of those who do not know our ideology,
or those who, knowing it, use it to distort it for their own benefit. We
must evaluate, among all of us, whether it is worth collaborating in
these projects. We also know that the State is very interested in
getting hold of the Amsterdam funds and will surely use all possible
tricks to achieve this.
I am reminded again of those comrades from Requejo de Sanabria
expropriating a building from the Power in a revolutionary act. Today,
does that same Power want to expropriate our Memory?
We must recover the 48 boxes from Amsterdam and bring them to our
archive in Yuncler or to another one that we consider appropriate. Our
ideas must only be spread by us with our daily work, our abilities and
our imagination. Let us get to work on it, let us not depend on anyone
but ourselves.
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https://www.cnt.es/noticias/las-cajas-de-amsterdam-kati-horna-y-margaret-michaelis/
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