The major consul of Escaldes-Engordany censures the exhibition of prohibited art by Tatxo Benet
The work that sparked the conflict is on the cover of Charlie Hebdo after the 2015 attack.
BarcelonaCensorship upon censorship. Tatxo Benet's exhibition of banned art at the Espai Caldes d'Andorra will not open to the public this Friday, after Rosa Gili, the Consul General of Escaldes-Engordany, ordered the removal of one of the works on display on Thursday, 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."
"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 has 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 warns.
The cover of the magazine Charlie Hebdo It was accompanied by another work on the victims of the attacks that followed the magazine's. It is a set of eight portraits in homage to the men and women who lost their lives by Daniel Ochoa de Olza. It was the same agency he worked for at the time, the Associated Press, that promoted the revocation of his third World Press Photo award.
The Andorran exhibition was titled Censorship is the curator of this exhibition, and it was the first major tour of the Censored collection after the opening of the Museum of Forbidden Art in Barcelona.