Collectable

Inferior, savage, archaic, tribal, barbarian. Against the ARROGANCE of patriotism

The Collectables of the Year Thirty

Indigenous, Amerindian, Andean, inferior, savage, coloured, commoner, peasant, communist… Sandra Gamarra writes those words on the back of reproductions of works from pre-Columbian collections in various Spanish museums, to reveal the terminology used to designate the notion of the ‘other’ in the lands exploited by European colonialism. An ‘other’ with reddish skin that the European imaginary often associates, totally fallaciously, with the Marxist tradition.

The same intransigent imaginary is reproduced in the series of postcards collected by Oriol Vilanova. While Gamarra focuses on Eurocentrism, Vilanova compiles the series of Francoist postcards published in 1939, immediately after the Spanish Civil War, under the title Forjadores de imperio (Forgers of Empire). It features thirty portraits of the ‘saviours of the motherland’, as the closest associates of the dictator Francisco Franco called themselves. Neither Gamarra nor Vilanova need to show images of violence to denounce, in a forceful and convincing manner, the arrogance and intolerance with which different historical regimes have scorned human diversity. They also put the accent on the false asepsis that lies behind portraiture as a supposedly descriptive genre, and the apparent neutrality of museum display cases.