Equipo Comunicación. Antifranquismo, edición, debate (1968-1979)
Curated by Juan Albarrán Diego, Paula Barreiro López and Rosa Benéitez Andrés
28 October – 6 December 2024
Sala de exposiciones, Autonomous University of Madrid

In June 1968, the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) was founded. Just a month later (on July 10), the artist and designer Alberto Corazón filed the application to establish a new publishing house: Comunicación. Until 1979, its essay collections published over a hundred books covering a wide range of topics, including Marxism, language theory, economics, avant-garde art, aesthetics, and architecture. Defining itself as a cultural “alternative,” Comunicación positioned itself as a front of anti-Francoist political intervention rather than a conventional publishing house. In fact, Comunicación also functioned as a collective of intellectuals, aiming to energize the nation’s cultural life through seminars and articles published in progressive media. The founding core of this collective consisted of Valeriano Bozal, Alberto Corazón, Miguel García Sánchez, and the brothers Alberto and Juan Antonio Méndez, all of whom had previously worked for the publishing house Ciencia Nueva (1965-1969). From 1971 onwards, others joined this group, including Miguel Bilbatúa, Leopoldo Lovelace, Ludolfo Paramio, Herminia Bevia, and Carlos Piera. Their dissident political alignment aroused the suspicions of the Franco regime, which labeled the publishing house as “conflictive.”

This exhibition seeks to recover the editorial and intellectual activities of Equipo Comunicación, relating it to the movement of non-tenured professors (PNN, profesores no numerarios) at UAM. During the final years of Francoism, this movement fought to improve the working conditions of the academic staff and to carve out spaces of freedom in a difficult transitional context. Several members and collaborators of Comunicación participated in this movement during their time as professors at UAM, including Enrique Álvarez, José Luis Linaza, Simón Marchán, and the aforementioned Bozal and Paramio. Comunicación, as a collective endeavor committed to the renewal of the social sciences and humanities, must be understood within the context of a turbulent university, where a struggle for the democratization of the institution and the country was taking place.

This exhibition is part of the research project Equipo Comunicación: publishing, cultural criticism and anti-Francoism, 1969-1979(322-MD-2023) and is complemented by two parallel activities:
-the guided visit to the exhibition on November 6, 2024 (12:30-13:30 pm, Sala de exposiciones UAM) in the framework of the XXIV Semana de la Ciencia y la Innovación.
-the seminar Equipo Comunicación, in context: anti-Francoism, publishing and cultural criticism (1968-1979) at the Centro Cultural La Corrala of the Autonomous University of Madrid.

For more information on the project see Equipo Comunicación