Catalonia: Franco’s Head Used in Protest Football Match

A football match with a hyperrealist head by Franco as a ball. The ex-abrupt contemporary art festival of Moià (Barcelona) has launched this call to play a “anti-fascist” performance this Thursday at six in the afternoon in the ancient trenches of the Civil War that are located on the path of the Coves del Toll.

“A symbolic football match will be held where art and political commitment will be found in the same space,” explains the organization for a proposal that they have called ‘the Generalissimo Cup’, which will have a “brotherhood” peck after the final whistle. “This call is not just a call to play football: it is an invitation to be part of a critical and committed work of art, which uses the body and game to question the legacy of fascism and historical revisionism,” defend the organizers.

Already on Friday, in the municipality the party recorded in two cultural spaces pending announcement will be screened. The author of this proposal is the Madrid artist Eugenio Merino, who defends his idea for the relationship of football with the Franco dictatorship. He does it as part of the Indecline collective, which has already carried out this initiative with other heads of right leaders such as Donald Trump in Mexico; Otto von Bismarck in Germany and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

Merino was already inspired by other occasions in Franco’s figure for his creations. He presented in Arco a replica of the dictator’s body inside a soda machine in 2012 and, just a year later, he returned to the fair with a punching ball made from the bust of that same figure.