Democratic Memory

Decolonising Europe. Colonial legacies and constructing difference

The conference will be held on 11 and 22 May 2018.

Curator: Sara Santamaría

Organised by: Institute of Pasts Present and El Born CCM

Colonial Barcelona: monument, architecture and public space

07/06/2017

Wednesday, 7 June, at 6 pm, at Districte de Ciutat Vella’s Sala Ernest Lluch (Pl. Bonsuccés, 3)

The monument to Antonio López

Shortly after the death of Antonio López in 1883, Barcelona City Council supported the proposal to erect a monument in his memory, as part of a policy for enhancing public spaces, which began incorporating contemporary figures. The monument, in the middle of Passeig d’Isabel II and close to the port, was officially unveiled in 1884, in reference to the naval and commercial companies founded by Antonio López. Notable architects of the time, such as Josep Oriol Mestres, took part in designing the monument, as did several renowned sculptors including Venanci Vallmitjana, the creator of the statue of López, and Lluís Puiggener, Rossend Nobas, Joan Roig and Francesc Pagè who made the pedestal’s four marble reliefs, representing merchant and banking activities (to the front), the Transatlantic Company (to the rear), the Norte railway (facing the sea) and General Tobacco Company of the Philippines (facing the mountains). The statue of López was made out of bronze melted down from the remains of the Transatlantic Company’s defunct sea vessels. The initiative to erect a monument to Antonio López came from his son, Claudi López, and Manuel Girona, outstanding men from Barcelona society of the time, although there were discrepancies at the time in the assessment and the appropriateness of the monument. In 1885 Francisco Bru, López’s brother-in-law, made a devastating portrait of him in his La verdadera vida de Antonio López y López:

What do you think, Spaniards, of this indignity? What do Barcelona’s women think? They can be very proud of having a statue of a shark in human flesh standing in one of its public squares, paying homage to a man who was notorious for his vile cruelty on the island of Cuba, before he earned his fame on Peninsula with his piles of money and lavishness. That square could rightly be called Plaza de los Negreros [Slave Traders Square], as it would represent a  monumental rehabilitation and radiant apotheosis of all human traffickers.

There was another notable occasion of controversy over the monument, in 1902, following the death of Jacint Verdaguer. A satirical magazine of that time, La Campana de Gràcia, published a cartoon strip in issue number 1,727 (June 1902), proposing the statue of López should be replaced with a statue of Verdaguer and: “The ousted statue melted down into bronze and given away to charity for the poor”, in line with the social sensitivity of Father Cinto. The comic strip was entitled, significantly enough, A practical idea and act of justice. The monument was finally pulled down at the start of the Spanish Civil War and its metal recycled as war material, as a show of rejection of a work commemorating an “Indian” linked to slave trafficking. But the monument was rebuilt during the early years of the Franco dictatorship, in 1944, when Miquel Mateu i Pla was the city’s mayor. The statue of López was recreated with the help of the sculptor Frederic Marès, using stone from Montjuïc, and the monumental complex relocated a few metres away from its original site. The monument was seen with increasingly critical eyes over time and eventually regarded as a justification for an unscrupulous nouveau riche who had dealt in slave trafficking. A series of citizen and critical-analysis initiatives were launched and then intensified in the 1990s, when the Diversity Festival was held next to the monument. SOS Racisme and the CCOO and UGT unions called on Barcelona City Council to remove it in 2010. The last few years have seen numerous petitions laid at the door of Barcelona City Council calling for it to take a stand on the issue. An increasing number and variety of arguments and proposals have appeared over the best way of acting, specifically, over the monument.

Barcelona History Museum

Antonio López y López (Comillas, 1817 – Barcelona, 1883)

Antonio López y López was born in Comillas (Cantabria) in 1817, to a family of modest means. He decided early on, as a adult, to emigrate: first to Lebrija (Seville), then to Mexico and finally to Cuba. It was in that Spanish colony that he ended up settling in the city of Santiago, where he launched several business activities, some individually and others together with a small group of partners, in two companies (Valdés y López i Antonio López y Hermano), during the 1840s and 1850s. Notable activities he and his partners devoted themselves to in Santiago de Cuba included managing four coffee plantations and four sugar mills, several properties built primarily by slaves. While 65 slaves worked at the Dulce Unión coffee plantation, 25 and 81 slaves worked respectively at the San José del Naranjo and Armonía sugar mills. López was also involved at the time in trafficking slaves from the coasts of Africa to Cuba, an activity that had been outlawed in 1820. It was in this complex chain of Atlantic trafficking that López was in charge of receiving cargoes or “batches” in eastern Cuba that the captains of slave-trafficking ships were clandestinely bringing over from Africa. Later on, he himself or his partners took to selling these African slaves in Santiago de Cuba or having them sent on to their opposite numbers to be sold at other points on the island (Cienfuegos, Matanzas, Havana etc.) López also ran a regular steamship line between Guantánamo and Santiago de Cuba, served by the steamship General Armero, one of the first of its kind used by the Spanish merchant navy. Like many other “Indians” who earned their fortunes at Gran Antilla or in some other part of America, López returned to the Spanish mainland with his wife and children. He opted to settle in Barcelona, where his wife’s family resided, and it was from the Catalan capital that he started to develop intense business activities thanks to the investment of the capital he had accumulated in Cuba. Amongst his business ventures, those worth particular mention included, his foundation, which he set up in 1857, and his subsequent management of a naval firm of steamships (originally called Antonio López and Company, and later the Transatlantic Company), an enterprise tasked with the official service of postal steamships to Spain’s colonies in the Antilles from 1861 on, and which soon became the country’s leading merchant navy. Thanks to this concession, López’s fleet of naval steamships transported thousands and thousands of Spanish soldiers to the Antilles fought, applying the unjust system of levies, in Spain’s various colonial wars (Santo Domingo, in 1863, and Cuba, from 1868 to 1878 and from 1895 to1898). It was also from Barcelona that López made a decisive contribution to the foundation, in 1876, of Banco Hispano-Colonial, a bank that financed the military campaigns the Spanish government had been waging during the Ten Years’ War in Cuba and of which he was the first Chairman. Once the war had ended, López used the Banco Hispano-Colonial to coordinate a strong business holding made up of several companies such as the powerful General Tobacco Company of the Philippines, a corporation that was created in 1881 to cover the void that the free trade of tobacco had left in that Spanish colony located in the South China Sea. Front cover of the magazine Umbral depicting the monument without the Antonio López sculpture, 1936. It was also in Barcelona that Antonio López y López become involved in notable political activities, which he carried out sometimes publicly and sometimes behind closed doors. He played a key role, for instance, in the founding of the Círculo Hispano Ultramarino de Barcelona, an entity that was set up in 1871 to halt any potential reformist policies in Cuba or Puerto Rico, and defend the colonial status quo based on the absolute prevalence of slave work in both colonies. As a reward for the intense public activity of a businessman who is the poster child for the concept of a self-made man, he was given the title of Marquess of Comillas by King Alfonso XII in 1878 and the title of Grandee of Spain in 1881. He died in Barcelona on 16 January 1883, leaving a hefty heritage and business legacy. A small, select committee of the city’s outstanding men soon promoted the idea of renaming Barcelona’s Plaça de Sant Sebastià after him and of putting up a statue of him there. Venanci Vallmitjana was commissioned with that work, which was officially unveiled on 13 September 1884, paid for by López’s admirers through an open collection.

Martín Rodrigo y Alharilla, the Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Pompeu Fabra

Why is there a monument to Columbus in Barcelona?

07/11/2016

A talk by Gustau Nerín and Stéphane Michonneau on 7 November 2016 at the Saló del Tinell.

Read Gustau Nerín’s talk.

Read Stéphane Michonneau’s talk.

Public Space, Gender and Memory

08/03/2016

Reflection on the dimension of memory in the city’s public space, adding a gender perspective to the debate by highlighting the points of view of female architects, urban planners and historians.

To mark 8 March, International Women’s Day, the European Memories Observatory of the University of Barcelona’s Solidarity Foundation and Barcelona City Council propose a space for debate at the round-table discussion “Public Space, Gender and Memory”. The purpose of this activity, organised for the International Seminar “Memory, Architecture and Public Space”, is to reflect on the dimension of memory in the city’s public space and add a gender perspective to the debate, by highlighting the points of view of female architects, urban planners and historians.

The architects Zaïda Muixí and Olga Tarrasó, art historian and critic Carme Grandas, historian and Commissioner for Memory Programmes at Barcelona City Council Ricard Vinyes, Councillor for Housing Josep Maria Montaner and architect Julian Bonder have been invited to be on the table. The goal is to create a dialogue on the past and present and on the proposals around public memory policies in urban spaces.  The debate will be guided by several key issues, such as how to create citizenship spaces, how to overcome memorial and gender deficits in public spaces and how to construct memory processes in public spaces by consolidating the gender perspective.

Antonio López y López (Comillas, 1817 – Barcelona, 1883)

Antonio López y López was born in Comillas (Cantabria) in 1817, to a family of modest means. He decided early on, as a adult, to emigrate: first to Lebrija (Seville), then to Mexico and finally to Cuba. It was in that Spanish colony that he ended up settling in the city of Santiago, where he launched several business activities, some individually and others together with a small group of partners, in two companies (Valdés y López and Antonio López y Hermano), during the 1840s and 1850s. Notable activities he and his partners devoted themselves to in Santiago de Cuba included managing four coffee plantations and four sugar mills, several properties built primarily by slaves. While 65 slaves worked at the Dulce Unión coffee plantation, 25 and 81 slaves worked respectively at the San José del Naranjo and Armonía sugar mills. López was also involved at the time in trafficking slaves from the coasts of Africa to Cuba, an activity that had been outlawed in 1820. It was in this complex chain of Atlantic trafficking that López was in charge of receiving cargoes or “batches” in eastern Cuba that the captains of slave-trafficking ships were clandestinely bringing over from Africa. Later on, he himself or his partners took to selling these African slaves in Santiago de Cuba or having them sent on to their opposite numbers to be sold at other points on the island (Cienfuegos, Matanzas, Havana etc.) López also ran a regular steamship line between Guantánamo and Santiago de Cuba, served by the steamship General Armero, one of the first of its kind used by the Spanish merchant navy.

Like many other “Indians” who earned their fortunes at Gran Antilla or in some other part of America, López returned to the Spanish mainland with his wife and children. He opted to settle in Barcelona, where his wife’s family resided, and it was from the Catalan capital that he started to develop intense business activities thanks to the investment of the capital he had accumulated in Cuba. Amongst his business ventures, those worth particular mention included, his foundation, which he set up in 1857, and his subsequent management of a naval firm of steamships (originally called Antonio López and Company, and later the Transatlantic Company), an enterprise tasked with the official service of postal steamships to Spain’s colonies in the Antilles from 1861 on, and which soon became the country’s leading merchant navy. Thanks to this concession, López’s fleet of naval steamships transported thousands and thousands of Spanish soldiers to the Antilles fought, applying the unjust system of levies, in Spain’s various colonial wars (Santo Domingo, in 1863, and Cuba, from 1868 to 1878 and from 1895 to 1898). It was also from Barcelona that López made a decisive contribution to the foundation, in 1876, of Banco Hispano-Colonial, a bank that financed the military campaigns the Spanish government had been waging during the Ten Years’ War in Cuba and of which he was the first Chairman. Once the war had ended, López used the Banco Hispano-Colonial to coordinate a strong business holding made up of several companies such as the powerful General Tobacco Company of the Philippines, a corporation that was created in 1881 to cover the void that the free trade of tobacco had left in that Spanish colony located in the South China Sea.

It was also in Barcelona that Antonio López y López become involved in notable political activities, which he carried out sometimes publicly and sometimes behind closed doors. He played a key role, for instance, in the founding of the Círculo Hispano Ultramarino de Barcelona, an entity that was set up in 1871 to halt any potential reformist policies in Cuba or Puerto Rico, and defend the colonial status quo based on the absolute prevalence of slave work in both colonies. As a reward for the intense public activity of a businessman who is the poster child for the concept of a self-made man, he was given the title of Marquess of Comillas by King Alfonso XII in 1878 and the title of Grandee of Spain in 1881. He died in Barcelona on 16 January 1883, leaving a hefty heritage and business legacy. A small, select committee of the city’s outstanding men soon promoted the idea of renaming Barcelona’s Plaça de Sant Sebastià after him and of putting up a statue of him there. Venanci Vallmitjana was commissioned with that work, which was officially unveiled on 13 September 1884, paid for by López’s admirers through an open collection.

Martín Rodrigo y Alharilla, the Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Pompeu Fabra

The Monument to Antonio López

Shortly after the death of Antonio López in 1883, Barcelona City Council supported the proposal to erect a monument in his memory, as part of a policy for enhancing public spaces, which began incorporating contemporary figures. The monument, in the middle of Passeig d’Isabel II and close to the port, in reference to the naval and commercial companies founded by Antonio López, was officially unveiled in 1884.

Notable architects of the time, such as Josep Oriol Mestres, took part in designing the monument, as did several renowned sculptors including Venanci Vallmitjana, the creator of the statue of López, and Lluís Puiggener, Rossend Nobas, Joan Roig and Francesc Pagès who made the pedestal’s four marble reliefs, representing merchant and banking activities (to the front), the Transatlantic Company (to the rear), the Norte railway (facing the sea) and General Tobacco Company of the Phillippines (facing the mountains). The statue of López was made out of bronze melted down from the remains of the Transatlantic Company’s defunct sea vessels.

The initiative to erect a monument to Antonio López came from his son, Claudi López, and Manuel Girona, outstanding men from Barcelona society of the time, although there were discrepancies at the time in the assessment and the appropriateness of the monument. In 1885 Francisco Bru, López’s brother-in-law, made a devastating portrait of him ins his La verdadera vida de Antonio López y López: “What do you think, Spaniards, of this indignity? What do Barcelona’s men think? They can be very proud of having a estatue of a shark in human flesh standing in one of its public squares, paying homage to a man who was notorious for his vile cruelty on the island of Cuba, before he earned his fame on Peninsula with his piles of money and lavishness. That square could rightly be called Plaza de los Negreros [Slave Traders Square ], as it would represent a monumental rehabilitation and radiant apotheosis of all human traffickers.”

There was another notable occasion of controversy over the monument in 1902, following the death of Jacint Verdaguer. A satirical magazine of that time, La Campana de Gràcia, published a cartoon strip in issue number 1,727 (June 1902), proposing the statue of López should be replaced with a statue of Verdaguer and :”The ousted statue melted down into bronze and given away to charity for the poor”, in line with the social sensitivity of Father Cinto. The comic strip was entitled, significantly enough, A practical idea and act of justice.

The monument was finally pulled down at the start of the Spanish Civil War and its metal recycled as war material, as a show of rejection of a work commemorating an “Indian” linked to slave trafficking. But the monument was rebuilt during the early years of the Franco dictatorship, in 1944, when Miquel Mateu i Pla was the city’s mayor. The statue of López was recreated with the help of the sculptor Frederic Marès, using stone from Montjuic, and the monumental complex relocated a few metres away from its original site. The monument was seen with encreasingly critical eyes over time an eventually regarded as a justification for an unscrupulous nouveau riche who had dealt in slave trafficking. A series of citizen and critical-analysis initiatives were launched and then intensified in the 1990s, when the Diversity Festival was held next to the monument. SOS Racisme and the CCOO and UGT unions called on Barcelona City Council to remove it in 2010. The last few years have seen numerous petitions laid at the door of Barcelona City Council calling for it to take a stand on the issue. An increasing number and variety of arguments and proposals have appeared over the best way of acting, specifically, over the monument.

Barcelona History Museum (MUHBA)

Link to an interview about Antonio López with the historian Martín Rodrigo at Eldiario.es

Link to news about the Farewell Celebration to Antonio López statue

Link to report about the Farewell Celebration to Antonio López statue