After a launch in 2011 – in the middle of a 15M hangover – The 70s by piecePepe Ribas (Barcelona, 1951) now returns with new memories of an era as fascinating as it was unjustly forgotten. Even in Barcelona, which is the city that benefited from it. This is the libertarian explosion which took place between 1976 and 1977 and which began to manifest itself at the end of the 1960s.
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 flagship publication called Star, that formed the backbone of Spain’s countercultural response at a time of rapid and profound change.
In addition, as Ribas states in a conversation with elDiario.es, Ajoblanco for the first time gave voice to such important lines of thought as environmentalism, radical feminism or the demand for LGBTI rights. “For five months in 1977 we had a circulation of 100,000 copies, and the rest of the months we reached 50,000 copies,” boasts the founder of the publication.
The fast times of the Spanish counterculture
The narrative rhythm of Angels dancing on the head of a pin remember Sometimes beyond When the hours are running out (Tusquets Editores), the memoirs that Carlos Barral wrote about his experience in the 60s and 70s at the head of Seix Barral publishing house. Both books have a devilish rhythm that conveys to the reader the feeling of being trapped in a whirlwind of events that will determine the future of the country.
And this feeling increases when we realize that its authors admit to us that they let themselves be carried away by said wind, thus becoming the protagonists of this fascinating era. “We talk a lot about Carmen Balcells as the center of the editorial revolution that took place in Barcelona in the 70s, but the real driving force was Barral,” Ribas says of the importance of the editor versus the one who It was García. The literary agent of Márquez and Vargas Llosa.
He also explains that the book Travel to California, which María José Ragué published in 1971, was the first counterculture guide for a generation which, she asserts, “grew up on myths but without teachers”, since its 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 this generation.
A call to mobilization for new generations
Ribas recounts the sequence of events that pushed him to write Angels dancing on the head of a pin. “First there is the success of the exhibition Underground and counterculture in Catalonia in the 70sof which I am the curator and who, after having been at the Palau Robert in Barcelona, is going to Madrid at the end of 2021.
This exposure, he says, made many young people aware of the existence of a counterculture that they were totally unaware of and which surprised them “because it had been conveniently hidden by the system.” “It is in this context,” he continues, “that Libros del KO invites me to write about those years, in particular about the libertarian explosion which took place between 1976 and 1977 and which culminated with the Libertarian Days. internationals 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 its founder explained, is that “he wanted to make a book that could reach today’s young people and motivate them to take control of their lives and to organize themselves to create a society and libertarian alternative.
“Given current expectations, they have nothing to lose,” acknowledges Ribas, who adds: “I would like this book to encourage them to get out of their current situation, to go live together in shared apartments, to support each other and to devote oneself to creation. » theater and culture on the margins. Because for him, true culture, and not commercial culture, “is created from the independence of the margins, and 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 substrate of the system: “There are already many groups that are questioning the system and working in this direction throughout the world. State, from Catalonia to Extremadura. »
A libertarian agora in the middle of the Franco regime
“Now we live in permanent linearity,” says Ribas and explains: “Today the rains were [en València]Before it was the volcano [en la Palma] or the Lorca earthquake and well before the 15M, but today these events bring very little social transformation, we continue in a capitalist linearity which takes us wherever it takes us…”. He wants underline the difference with late Francoism and the Transition where, as he says in the book, a fundamental change could occur every month.
He immediately clarifies: “The 15M was a very hopeful demand for libertarianism and direct democracy, but unfortunately it ended up being capitalized on by certain parties who channeled the movement towards the system of representative democracy against which they were precisely fighting. » He points out Podemos in particular, because “it has 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: “It was full of Marxists even though I was libertarian. » “We had to dialogue with the situationists, with the anarchists, with the Marxists,” he adds, boasting that “in the second Ajoblanco, practically all the new culture of the 80s and 90s was written there.”
Barcelona was in turmoil
“Barcelona was the cultural capital of Spain in the 70s and into the 80s,” says Ribas. “Here there were publishing houses, record companies, advertising agencies, experimental theater,” he says, also highlighting “the recovery of popular Mediterranean festivals after the civil war, Els Comediants, Els Joglars, etc.”
He adds filmmakers like Pere Portabella or architects like Ricardo Bofill to the list of restless characters who stood out in a Spain that, culturally, was a desert: “Of course, there were groups in Madrid, Seville, Bilbao, Valencia and elsewhere. cities, but they were comparatively less populated. The book highlights Ceesepe from Madrid and Javier Valenzuela and Amadeu Fabregat from Valencia, who helped write the dossier on the Fallas that caused the closure of Ajoblanco in 1976.
However, as Ribas acknowledges, after the climax of the International Libertarian Days of June 1977, all this excitement ended up dissipating with surprising speed. “Several things happened,” Ribas replies to try to explain this fainting. “Many people from the libertarian movement moved to rural areas,” he reveals.
He also evokes the heroine, who did not affect his generation but affected the following ones, leaving the movement without continuity. He adds that the development of nationalism, which only supported Catalan, pushed many artists and cultural leaders to settle in Madrid, which was waking up.
“In any case,” he warns, “unlike what happened in the countercultural Barcelona of the 70s, the Madrid culture of the 80s [la movida madrileña] “It was a subsidized crop.” And he concludes the conversation by lamenting that “we find ourselves with two cities, Madrid and Barcelona, which, instead of collaborating as they did in the 70s, are in blatant competition.”
