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

BarcelonaThe lawyer Oriol Arau visited Salvador Puig i Antich in prison 69 times. The helplessness that 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. For this reason, this Monday one of Puig's sisters, Montse Puig Antich, and the lawyer Magda Oranich were impressed when they saw him in the film El sopar, by Pere Portabella, 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 analyze the political commitment of both creators and reveal "the invisible threads" between the two. This first session was focused on paralleling El sopar, which Portabella secretly filmed with five former political prisoners the night of Puig Antich's execution, and Miró's triptych L'esperança del condemnat a mort, which he finished the same day of the execution. "Apart from the lawyer stuff, Salvador and Oriol talked a lot about us. Salvador knew about us, not only when we went to see him, because we could say little and, on the other hand, 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 man". "It is interesting to see how Miró linked this work with historical events and with the end of Francoism, which makes it a political work, while in the three previous 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 makes it a political act," she stressed. On the other hand, the poor sound quality affected the initial diffusion of "The Supper", as recalled by Portabella's collaborator Jordi Vidal Amorós, who explained that Portabella abandoned the idea that the characters in "The Supper" should speak about Puig Antich; and he also showed images of a project by Portabella about Puig Antich that remained in the drawer. "We must understand and contextualize that they 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 at the time 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 under Francoism, Jon Paredes Manot, Txiki. She recalled the brutality of the Francoist apparatus and also her collaborations with Portabella, from which a fragment of Informe general sobre unas cuestiones de interés para una proyección pública was shown, returning to the place where Txiki was shot. "Pere was always active, much more than it seemed from the outside," said Oranich.

Dolors Rodríguez, moderator of the event and curator at the Fundació Joan Miró, pointed out a final aspect 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 L'esperança del condemnat a mort: "He would have sworn!", she told his sisters from the front row. "I don't know if he would have sworn, but he would have been very happy," added Montse Puig Antich. "I told Oriol that he never thought we had left him out, and I think he was very proud of it," she said.