Curator: Constantino Bértolo with cooperation to César de Vicente Hernando

We know that the past has an impact on the present and on the shaping of the future. However, we know too that the inverse is also true: that the idea of the future conditions expectations of the present and that each present reads the events of the past in the light of itself. In 1917, the Bolshevik revolution was the culmination of the socialist emancipation movement that the revolutions of 1848 had launched, as well as the starting point of the propositions of communism as a future prospect in politics, at least until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Intervention 1917. The Year We Really Made the Revolution presents a reading of this event that ‘moved the world’ and which for decades has permeated cultural consciousnesses and the ideologies of political activism. It is not a ‘celebratory exhibition’, an ‘iconographic chronicle’ or a ‘historical account’. It does not aspire to critical balance, exultant hagiography or comfortable melancholy either. What we hope to do is to present a ‘report on the current state of the Soviet revolution of 1917’ in order to facilitate a reading of the voices and echoes of the event in the light of today. It is, therefore, a reading of a reading: a reading with a clear determination to contribute to the collective construction of an account of the Soviet revolution that still continues to play a notable role in this great global narrative that surrounds us and carries us along; a reading that takes the questions and answers of today to explore the present and the future of that revolution. In consequence, moreover, it brings back within the walls of the Palau de la Virreina the climate of revolution that once filled the air.

To develop this intervention, a series of materials and devices were designed which, without falling into the didactic and without hiding a transparent ideological empathy for what this event historically represented, enable ‘readers’ to build their own reading as they see fit. To this end, the decision was made to formulate a strategy aimed at dumbfounding and disturbing the most likely prior readings given the various political positions and attitudes in our political scene.

On this basis, it was decided that the rhetorics of evidential realism (the dramatic portrayal, talk, dialogue, debate and period archives) would be used as the means of verbal or iconic expression, combined with the ironic or tangential (photocalls, television fabrications and Franco-era films of anti-communism) as poetic complements, in order to bring out to the fullest possible extent the latent or silent political tensions surrounding this revolution today.

Works:

Map of revolutions

The Russian Revolution was an extraordinarily complex process, due basically to the range of social forces taking part and the radical transformation it involved for social formation and because it went on for so long. Nevertheless, it wasn’t the only one to take place during the 20th century. All over the world, emancipatory projects drove other revolutionary processes for which the events of 1917 were an example to follow. From precedents such as the Paris Commune (1871) or the Mexican Revolution (1910) to the Sandinista Revolution (1979) or the Zapatista Revolution (1994), a red thread crosses continents, different societies and a range of lifestyles and cultures.

Reception of the Bolshevik Revolution in the Spanish press in 1917

In the midst of the First World War, the Spanish press and magazines reported on the revolutionary processes that were taking place in Czarist Russia. The way in which the news, which generally came from French agencies and newspapers, presented the events to readers shows how little the bourgeois press understood what it really meant. It was not until some years later, with the example of the revolution circulating worldwide, that it could be fully appreciated. On the other hand, the anarchist and socialist newspapers focused their attention on the consequences of what was to be a radical change in the social systems that made the western world tick. Ideals and utopias stopped being that and materialised in a specific time and place.

Communists Anonymous Ltd.
(digital short film)
A Colectivo Contracampo production. Duration 11’

This digital short film is a specific production by Colectivo Contracampo. A group of people attend one of the many meetings held in various parts of the world organised by the international aid community against the disease of communism. The people gathered there share their experiences during the week and provide each other with mutual strength to resist and solve this common problem that makes them go against capitalism instead of admiring it, hate their bosses instead of learning from their tenacity and energy, and conspire to change society instead of accepting the state of things and resigning themselves to the position life has set for them.

The self-criticism corner
(electronic device)
A Colectivo Contracampo production. Duration 18’ 20’’

Following in the wake of the many television and radio programmes that help us understand what we do and don’t do by reflecting on our actions and thoughts, this individual, intimate, private space, produced specifically by Colectivo Contracampo, has a screen on which can be seen the devastating global effects of capitalism: ecological crisis, exploitation, slavery, feelings of emptiness, etc. And, in the end, the chance to answer a single question: ‘And you, why don’t you become a communist?’.