The 69 visits that broke Puig Antich's solitude in prison

BarcelonaLawyer Oriol Arau visited Salvador Puig i Antich in prison 69 times. The helplessness Puig suffered must have been terrible, but the visits Arau made to him during the five and a half months he was locked up in La Model until he was executed meant a lot. That is why, this Monday, one of Puig's sisters, Montse Puig Antich, and lawyer Magda Oranich were impressed when they saw him in Pere Portabella's film El sopar, during the third Campus Miró of the Fundació Joan Miró, which this year is dedicated to the Seqüències Portabella, coinciding with the filmmaker's centenary. That is to say, to analyze the political commitment of both creators and reveal "the invisible threads" between them. This first session focused on drawing a parallel between El sopar, which Portabella shot clandestinely with five political ex-convicts on the night of Puig Antich's execution, and Miró's triptych L'esperança del condemnat a mort, which he declared finished on the same day of the execution. "Apart from lawyer matters, Salvador and Oriol talked a lot about us. Salvador knew about us, not just when we went to see him, because we could say little, and instead, with Oriol we could talk," recalled Montse Puig Antich.

The hope of the condemned man can be seen in one of the two chapels of the foundation's permanent collection, expressly designed by Miró to exhibit this triptych and that of Painting on a white background for the cell of a solitary person. "It is interesting to see how Miró linked this work with historical events and the end of Francoism, a fact that makes it a political work, whereas in the previous three triptychs Miró always spoke of this idea of solitude," stated the head of the foundation's collection, Teresa Montaner. "Miró transfers all this emotion to the work and to the people, which turns it into a political event," she stressed. On the other hand, the poor quality of the sound prejudiced the initial diffusion of The Dinner, as recalled by Portabella's collaborator Jordi Vidal Amorós, who explained that Portabella abandoned the idea of the characters in The Dinner speaking about Puig Antich; and he also showed images of a Portabella project about Puig Antich that remained in the drawer. "We have to understand and contextualize that these are militant but clandestine films. There is a very relevant element: they are films that are shot, but it is not known who will see them, because the basic mission they had then was to document what was happening here so that it would be seen abroad," said Vidal.

Oranich was the lawyer for Puig Antich and the last person sentenced to death by Francoism, Jon Paredes Manot, Txiki. She recalled the brutality of the Francoist apparatus and also his collaborations with Portabella, of which a fragment of Informe general sobre unas cuestiones de interés para una proyección pública could be seen, in which he returns to the place where Txiki was shot. "Pere was always militating, much more than was seen from the outside," said Oranich.

Dolors Rodríguez, moderator of the event and conservator of the Fundació Joan Miró, pointed out a final facet of Miró's work, the emotional one. She also remembered Puig Antich as someone "very sensitive, a great reader," and posed the question of what Puig Antich would have thought if he had been able to see La esperanza del condenado a muerte: "He would have said a swear word!", she told her sisters from the front row. "I don't know if he would have said a swear word, but he would have been very happy," added Montse Puig Antich. "I told Oriol that he never thought we had left him aside, and I think he was very proud," she said.