Andorra cancels Tatxo Benet's banned art exhibition due to "fear for national security"

BarcelonaCensorship upon censorship. The Escaldes-Engordany municipality has definitively canceled the exhibition of prohibited art by Tatxo Benet at the Espai Caldes d'Andorra, after the parish's chief consul, Rosa Gili, ordered the removal of one of the works on display yesterday, specifically the magazine's front cover. Charlie Hebdo after the jihadist attack of January 7, 2015, in which a dozen people died. According to sources from the Museum of Forbidden Art, Gili ordered the removal of the cover, which bears the slogan "All is forgiven," out of "fear for Andorra's national security" and because he does not want to have "drops of blood" on his conscience.

According to the Escaldes-Engordany municipality, the decision was made in a context of "high terrorist alert, with a level 4 out of 5 in Spain and 5 out of 5 in France, and taking into account the proximity to the start of the Games of Small States, which begin this Monday." Given that "maintaining the exhibition could entail risks that must be avoided out of institutional responsibility," the municipality has decided to "close the exhibition." They also wish to reiterate their commitment to "freedom of expression and the promotion of a critical culture," but "always within a framework that guarantees security and collective well-being." The Museum of Forbidden Art has confirmed in another statement that it will not allow itself to be censored, that its commitment to freedom of expression is "total," and that it cannot accept that "a specific work be prohibited without affecting the entire collection."

Following the cancellation, those responsible for the Museum of Forbidden Art have called for a rally this afternoon at 6:30 p.m. beneath the Espai Caldes, to "denounce a serious act of institutional censorship that violates artistic and expressive freedom" and to defend creative freedom and against any form of repression. "Gili, art is not censored. It is defended," the museum emphasizes. The rally was attended by around thirty people, who covered their eyes with red tape and hung posters against the cancellation of the exhibition on the space's elevator.

In statements to the media, this afternoon Rosa Gili admitted that she regretted having carried out an act of "censorship of censorship" and that she learned that the exhibition included the cover of Charlie Hebdo yesterday afternoon, an hour before the inauguration, because she wasn't present at the governing committee that announced the list of works. "I've lived a lot in France, I'm a professor on leave from the French system, and therefore, I know a little about what happened with this issue in France. From there, dialogue yes, censorship yes, debate yes. But not at any price; I mean, I prefer censorship than going to a funeral," said Gili, who recalled the jihadist murder of a French teacher, Samuel Paty, in 2020 and then debated the depiction of Muhammad in class. Furthermore, the international context and the upcoming start of the Games of Small States were also decisive in her withdrawing the work. "I have convictions as a person," he added, "but I believe that when you're a politician and have responsibilities, perhaps you can put your convictions aside in favor of the greater good, which is the security of the State. Therefore, I considered that we shouldn't go looking for what we don't have, and I didn't want to risk spilling even one."

Educate about censorship

"We didn't expect anything like this to happen, because the selection of works had been passed by a government committee and the space's team had received it very well. It was a case of clumsy and primitive censorship," laments the artistic director of the prohibited art collection, Carles Guerra. "Tatxo Benet told the consul that he doesn't accept any type of censorship, because the mission of this collection is precisely to educate about these types of incidents and conflicts," he said Thursday night.

The magazine's cover Charlie Hebdo accompanied another work on the victims of the attacks, a set of eight portraits in homage to the men and women who lost their lives, the work of Daniel Ochoa de Olza. It was the same agency he worked for at the time, the Associated Press, who promoted the revocation of his third World Press Photo award due to a rights issue. "When I, as curator, put the cover of Charlie Hebdo Along with the photos of the victims, I say that this forms a single body. Revealing the cover is revealing something in the photos of the victims, and the same is true of the entire exhibition," says Guerra. However, the museum has provided a link for downloading the exhibition catalogue.

The Andorran exhibition was titled Censorship is the curator of this exhibition, and it was the first major tour of the collection Censored after the opening of the Museum of Forbidden Art in Barcelona. It includes works by eighteen artists, including established artists such as Marta Minujín, Daniel G. Andújar, Mounir Fatmi, María Evelia Marmolejo, Paul McCarthy, Ai Wei Wei, and Núria Güell.