Portbou 1939
At the end of 2020, Arnau Gonzàlez i Vilalta proposed me to photograph the landscape around Portbou, between Coll del Frare and Coll de Belitres. The photographs would be part of the exhibition The Day After the Retreat. Antoni Campañà. Portbou, 1939: Self-portrait of Absence at the MUME (Exile Memorial Museum) in La Jonquera, and they would serve as a counterpoint to the photographs that Antoni Campañà took in March 1939 when, accompanying the Francoist troops, he traced the remains of the Spanish Republican army’s retreat to the French border.
Arnau Gonzàlez i Vilalta has also been the curator of the retrospective exhibition of Antoni Campañà’s work titled The Endless War at the MNAC (National Art Museum of Catalonia), along with Toni Monné and Plàcid Garcia-Planas.
A landscape full of absences
The landscapes of Empordà, like those of Europe as a whole, have been superimposing layers of oblivion and absences that were once thought unthinkable.
Like the rest of the paths of Exile - from 1936 or 1939 - those roads that Campañà traced, those rocks that cut into the sky, and the exhausted yet exultant Francoist soldiers to whom he gave humanity, followed their course. The material remains faded away. The vehicles, like his when he was chauffeur to Major Ramon Dou i d’Abadal, were transient presences. Campañà’s gaze, which traversed the 20th century intersecting atmospheres, moments, and evocative characters of the uncomfortable continuities of history, did not cease to intervene in those forgettings. Whether intentional or a product of the transition from black and white to color, the postcard and artistic photography would desacralize those scenarios.
Portbou did not stop in 1939, nor with the European exiles of 1940-1945. Tourism, the active border, or the international station remained active until, with the passage of decades, they mutated towards an absence, in this case with architectural traces.
It is this string of conceptual absences that, while inspired by Campañà, we revisit through the eyes of the photographer Pau Guerrero.
Arnau Gonzàlez i Vilalta
