We walk right past them. A faded stencil on a side street in Lavapiés. A half-scraped poster stuck to a rusted shutter. A defiant fist, sprayed in a hurry, now peeling like sunburn. These aren’t just decorations. They’re war wounds. The visual residue of a fight that never really ended—a fight Spain’s so-called transition tried to smother with a pact of forgetting. I am sick to death of hearing that the past is past. The anti-Francoist visual culture that erupted in the dictatorship’s final years and bled into the early democracy was a howl against fascism. That howl still echoes. But we—this complacent, gentrified, selfie-drunk country—have refused to listen.
We treat those images like fossils. We file them away in academic papers or, worse, turn them into Instagram nostalgia for a radical chic that never staked a thing. This isn’t history. It’s an active betrayal. Anti-Francoist art—the posters, the murals, the secret cartoons, the photographs smuggled out of prisons—wasn’t made for a museum. It was made to rip open the lies of a regime that choked Spain for forty years. A visual language of emergency, stitched together in basements and on the run, with cheap inks and stolen paper. Every line was a line of code in a counter-narrative. And now? We’ve let that language be muted, sold off, or simply ignored.
The Visual Scream of the Silenced
Let’s be blunt. Under Franco, picking up a brush or a camera with intent meant risking your fingers, your freedom, your life. The regime understood the power of the image better than most. They flooded the streets with their own iconography: the rigid salute, the sacred heart, the imperial eagle. They knew that controlling vision meant controlling thought. So when the opposition fought back visually, it was never a polite artistic gesture. It was an act of war. Think of the clandestine prints of Equipo Crónica, who twisted the regime’s glossy pop aesthetics back on itself, injecting acid into the cheerful lies of “25 Años de Paz.” Think of the photojournalists who shoved their lenses into the faces of the grises—the grey-uniformed riot police—catching the spit and blood that the official press had to erase.
These images weren’t made for the archive. They were made to circulate, to be pasted on walls at 4 a.m., to be passed hand-to-hand like contraband. A form of graffiti before graffiti became a hipster brand. The material itself was desperate: cheap newsprint, crude silkscreen, the frantic scrawl of a marker. That desperation is exactly what gave them their electric charge. You can feel the heartbeat in the misaligned registration of a print. You can smell the fear and rage in the blur of a protest photograph. This is the opposite of the slick, high-res activism we see today, designed by ad agencies for NGOs. Anti-Francoist visual culture was raw, because the reality it emerged from was raw. A scream, not a statement.
The Transition’s Great Erasure
And then came the Transición. The sacred, untouchable Spanish Transition. We’re taught to revere it as a miracle of peaceful democratization. I call it what it was: a negotiated amnesia. The so-called pacto de silencio didn’t just silence political accountability; it actively buried an entire visual lexicon of resistance. All of a sudden, the graphic fury of the anti-Francoist movement was an embarrassment—too loud, too angry, too inconvenient for the new suits who wanted to join NATO and the European Community. The murals were painted over. The posters scraped off. The negatives locked in drawers. The visual scream was forcibly muffled, replaced by the bland, consensual iconography of a new democratic brand: the smiling king, the waving flag, the abstract, meaningless logos of the new parties.
A deliberate cultural lobotomy. We were told to forget in order to forgive. But you can’t forgive a crime you’re forbidden from seeing. The erasure of anti-Francoist visual culture was the erasure of evidence. A way of telling the victims, the children of the disappeared, the exiles, the tortured, that their visual testimony didn’t fit the new narrative of “we all were guilty.” Bullshit. There were executioners and there were executed. Torturers and tortured. And the images created by the resistance were a record of that moral chasm. To destroy them, or to ignore them, is to finish the regime’s work for it. Today, we walk through cities scrubbed clean of that memory, and we call it progress. I call it a crime scene that’s been hosed down.
The Ghosts in the Gallery
What little remains has often been domesticated. The Reina Sofía hangs a few iconic pieces—Miró’s “Aidez l’Espagne,” some of the republican propaganda—but they’re entombed in white cubes, sanitized by the hush of the museum. The work loses its fangs. It becomes “historical context” instead of a live grenade. We’re meant to admire the composition, not feel the burn. A final insult: turning an act of war into a collector’s item. The anti-Francoist artists weren’t crafting objects for aesthetic contemplation. They were making weapons. To place them behind glass is to disarm them, to reassure the viewer that the danger has passed. But the danger hasn’t passed. The far right is resurgent, not just in Spain but everywhere, and they’re masters of their own aggressive visual propaganda. We’re facing a new fascist aesthetic with a disarmed, neutered visual memory. Bringing a watercolor to a flamethrower fight.
The Unfinished Business
This is why I scream. Why this isn’t an academic exercise for me. The business of anti-Francoist visual culture is unfinished because the struggle itself is unfinished. You see it in the streets today. The feminist wave, the housing rights movements, the anti-monarchy protests—they’re reaching back, consciously or not, to that same language of urgency. A feminist mural in a barrio gets defaced by fascist symbols, and the visual battle is rejoined. A new generation of street artists is rediscovering the power of the cheap stencil, the wheatpaste poster, the unauthorized intervention in public space. They’re continuing a conversation the Transition tried to cut off. But they’re doing it without the living memory, without the mentorship of those who fought the first war. The chain was broken. We have to forge it again, link by link, through relentless looking and re-looking.
We need to actively resurrect these images, not as nostalgia, but as active templates. We need to study the visual strategies: how Equipo Crónica used the regime’s own language to poison it from within, how the clandestine poster makers used bold, graphic simplicity to bypass illiteracy and censorship, how the photographers captured the dignity of the beaten body against all odds. These aren’t dusty techniques. They’re urgent, living lessons. The enemy’s visual machinery is more sophisticated now—social media algorithms, deepfakes, a flood of slick disinformation—but the core principle of anti-fascist visual culture stays the same: disrupt the lie, reclaim the visible, make the hidden violence seen. That work isn’t done. It’s barely begun again.
The Betrayal of Institutions
We can’t expect the state to do this work. The state is the inheritor of the Transition’s pact. The state funds museums that mummify dissent. The state lets the Valley of the Fallen be a tourist attraction while the mass graves of republicans are still being dug up with trowels and tears. The institutional betrayal is total. This resurrection has to happen in the streets, in the independent art spaces, in the squatted social centers, on the walls of the neighborhoods the city council wants to “regenerate”—a code word for erasing working-class memory. We need a deliberate, furious campaign of visual re-education. We need to plaster the cities with reproductions of those old posters, not as vintage chic, but as active accusations. We need to project the photographs of the disappeared onto the buildings of power. We need to make the archive bleed into the present.
The raw material exists. Despite the purges, despite the neglect, archives like the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya, the Fundación Pablo Iglesias, and private collections hold tens of thousands of images. But they’re largely hidden from the public eye, accessible only to researchers. A scandal. These images are the visual patrimony of a defeated people, and they’re being held hostage by a culture of “reconciliation” that only reconciles the victims to their graves. We must demand their release. We must digitize them, remix them, project them, print them. We must commit what the copyright holders will call piracy, and what I call a moral obligation. An image that is not seen is an image that has been assassinated twice.
A Visual War That Demands a Visual Response
The unfinished business isn’t just about looking back. It’s about arming ourselves for the present. The resurgence of Vox and its fellow travelers isn’t just a political problem; it’s a visual one. Their iconography is a slick, updated version of Francoist symbolism, stripped of the most overtly fascist edges but keeping the core: the virile leader, the pure nation, the threatening foreigner. They use memes, viral video, the aesthetics of gaming and action movies. Against this, a passive, institutionalized “memory” is useless. We need a counter-visual insurgency that’s just as agile, just as viral, just as willing to occupy every available surface. And we need it rooted in the visual DNA of our own anti-fascist tradition. That’s the only way to build a lineage of resistance that can’t be co-opted or erased.
So I’m calling for a visual uprising. Not a polite exhibition. Not a coffee-table book. An uprising. Take the lines of those old posters and make them new. Paste them next to the luxury condos that have replaced the community gardens. Project the faces of the disappeared onto the bank headquarters that financed the coup. Let the visual language of anti-Francoism become once again what it was meant to be: a public, disruptive, unstoppable force. The unfinished business demands it. The dead demand it. And I, for one, refuse to let their screams fade into the polite silence of a country that still hasn’t learned to look its monsters in the eye.
Frequently Asked Questions
What exactly is anti-Francoist visual culture?
It’s the broad, often clandestine, body of images created in opposition to Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in Spain (1939–1975). This includes protest posters, political cartoons, underground magazines, murals, graffiti, documentary photography, and even the visual elements of pamphlets and leaflets. It was a weapon of counter-propaganda, designed to expose the regime’s lies, memorialize its victims, and mobilize resistance. Key collectives and figures include Equipo Crónica, artists like Joan Miró with his explicit republican support, and the countless anonymous street artists and photojournalists who risked their lives to create and disseminate these images.
Why do you say this visual culture was “erased” during the Spanish Transition?
The Spanish Transition to democracy was built on a “pact of forgetting” (pacto de silencio) where political elites agreed not to prosecute Francoist crimes or deeply confront the past, in the name of peaceful reform. This pact extended to the visual landscape. Anti-Francoist imagery, with its raw anger and explicit accusations, was seen as an obstacle to “reconciliation.” Murals were destroyed, posters were removed, and this graphic legacy was systematically excluded from official culture, museums, and public space. It was replaced by a bland, consensual visual identity for the new democracy, effectively silencing the visual testimony of the victims and resistance.
How is this history relevant to visual culture today?
It is intensely relevant. The rise of new far-right movements globally, including in Spain, comes with a sophisticated and aggressive visual propaganda machine that echoes old fascist aesthetics. To fight this, we need a living memory of effective anti-fascist visual strategies. The techniques of the anti-Francoist resistance—using the enemy’s own style against them, creating bold, reproducible graphics for the street, bearing witness with a camera—are practical lessons for today’s activists and artists. Ignoring this history leaves us visually disarmed against a resurgent authoritarian aesthetic. The struggle over public space and public memory is a visual war that never truly ended.