Equipo Comunicación: publishing, cultural criticism and anti-Francoism, 1969-1979

From 1969 to 1979, the publishing house Alberto Corazón Editor published an extensive catalog of books structured in five collections: Comunicación series A, B, C and D/D (documentation/debates), and Colección Visor de Poesía. Equipo Comunicación was also the name of a group of intellectuals who dynamized the cultural life of the late Francoism and the transition to democracy through an intense publishing activity, but also through seminars and collective texts published in various journals. The founding group was formed by Valeriano Bozal, Alberto Corazón, Alberto Méndez, Juan Antonio Méndez and Miguel García Sánchez, who were joined by Ludolfo Paramio, Leopoldo Lovelace, Miguel Ángel Bilbantúa and Carlos Piera, among others. From anti-Francoist positions and assuming a strong political commitment, Comunicación put into circulation more than one hundred books by national and international authors, designed by Alberto Corazón. Titles on Marxism, language theory, semiotics, philosophy, architecture, art history, cinema, theater and literature, which offered materials to enrich political and cultural debates, and opened spaces for freedom in the process of democratization.

This research project aims to recover, study and contextualize the activity of Equipo Comunicación. The team will be revisited as a fundamental agent in the articulation of an anti-Francoist and proto-democratic cultural field. Some of its members and collaborators were prominent figures in the artistic context of the late Franco regime (Bozal, Corazón, Marchán), and some of the titles published had an enormous impact on the reconfiguration and modernization of artistic discourses and practices. But the collective also edited and worked on other problems and disciplines, through translations of unpublished or little-known authors in Spain, such as Alejo Carpentier, Pasolini, Galvano Della Volpe, Meyerhold, Zygmunt Bauman, Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, Mayakovski, Noam Chomsky, Corrado Maltese, Viktor Sklovski, George Kubler, Friedrich Antal, Heinrich Wölfflin and Renato de Fusco.

• Equipo Comunicación. Antifranquismo, edición, debate (1968-1979) (Sala de exposiciones, UAM, 28 October – 6 December 2024)
• Equipo Comunicación, in Context: Anti-Francoism, Publishing, and Cultural Criticism (Centro Cultural La Corrala, UAM, 6-8 November 2024)