Exposition "Josep Bartolí: Drawing is fighting"
- Title:
- Exposition "Josep Bartolí: Drawing is fighting"
- When:
- Sat, 17. January 2026 - Sun, 31. May 2026
- Category:
- Exposició Temporal Actual EN
Description
Exhibition "Josep Bartolí: Drawing is Fighting"
From January 17 to May 31, 2026
Opening, Saturday, January 17, at 12:00
Exhibition produced by the Ribesaltes Memorial Camp within the framework of the European project « Exilis 1936-1946 ».
Based on the Memorial de Ribesaltes's collection of sketches and preparatory drawings by the cartoonist and artist Josep Bartolí Guiu (Barcelona, 1910 - New York, 1995), this exhibition explores the evolution of the artistic creation of Bartolí's drawings, sketches made between 1939 and 1941, which were finally published in 1944 in Mexico (Ediciones Iberia) included in the book "Campos de concentración (1939-194...)". This publication, with texts by Narcís Molins i Fàbrega (Tortellà, Garrotxa, 1901- Cualta, Mexico, 1962) and illustrations by Josep Bartolí, was intended to bear witness to the reality of the French concentration camps.
From February 1939, at the end of the civil war, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards, adults and children, men and women, crossed the border with France driven by their attempt to survive, motivated by hope, in search of a place to rebuild their lives. But this was not the France of citizen rights, freedom, equality and fraternity, but a France that was being seduced by fascism and was about to agree to surrender to Hitler's Germany. The former Republican combatants, including the International Brigaders, were taken to numerous refugee camps that soon demonstrated their true nature: concentration camps where they would be denied their dignity and where they would suffer hunger and harassment. Many returned to Franco's Spain. Others tried to survive in Daladier's France and Vichy France. Some of them, before and during the Second World War, would be incorporated into the Companies and Groups of Foreign Workers -such is the case of Molins i Fábrega, who worked on the works of the Trans-Saharan railway in Algeria-, and some were sent to German concentration camps, where most of them lost their lives.
