The Circle of Fine Arts inaugurates 'Colita. antifeminine'

The Fine Arts Circle and La Fábrica, in collaboration with the Colita Archive, inaugurate the Colita exhibition. Antifémina, which will remain in the Goya del Cercle room until next May 5. The exhibition recovers the photographic work of this fundamental author, published in book format in 1977 under the same title, together with the texts of the writer Maria Aurèlia Campmany. Images that resonate today with the same intensity.

46 years ago Colita (Isabel Steva Hernández) and Maria Aurèlia Capmany came together to claim the role of women in a sexist society. Each from their professions, one, a photographer and the other, a writer, published Antifèmina, which was quickly withdrawn from the market, but which became a critical and vindictive cult book. In its pages, the daily life of those beings that they consider marginalized, the "subversive" reality that women have always dragged along, was represented. "Antifemina - writes Mary Nash in the foreword of the reissued book - confronts the collective patriarchal imaginary with textual and visual discourses that subvert the canon that had projected the masculine as the universal norm and excluded women from the great narratives."
For the preparation of the book, Colita carried out a review of her work so far, selecting from her photographic archive images of women from 1960 to 1976. She recovered images of the different states and social classes in which the woman appears as a protagonist: the world of the gypsies of Somorrostro and Montjuïc, women workers in factories, old age or prostitution. Colita proposed the images and Maria Aurèlia accompanied them with a text in which she asks, and asks the reader, questions related to the topics raised, always from a feminist point of view and a critical and vindictive tone.

Years later, Colita and Francesc Polop, director of its Archive and curator of the exhibition, recovered the project by locating and restoring the original negatives. The book was finally re-edited and published in 2021 by Terranova publishing and Barcelona City Council.
The current exhibition of the Cercle de Belles Arts shows for the first time a representative selection of Colita's photographic work. It brings together, in addition to various documentary and audiovisual material, 94 of the 176 photographs contained in the book. Its structure obeys the ten chapters into which the publication is divided and which address, in a critical and didactic tone, old age, marriage, work, religion, prostitution, reification, marginalization, models, the costume and the flower. This is the first exhibition held after the author's death in December 2023. It is also her last project, since it was worked on and imagined down to the last detail, which makes the exhibition a tribute to the his trajectory

The validity of his denunciations and reflections means that today this pioneering project needs to see the light of day again. Through this exhibition, the value of the book is highlighted and the figure of two intellectual and brave women who fought in a turbulent time to dignify the fact of being a woman and talk about feminism, in a clear and direct way, is vindicated. The conjunction of Colita's profoundly humanistic view and Capmany's reflective words offers us a remarkable heritage of historical memory of the society that emerged from the long Francoist dictatorship.

The aim of the exhibition is to highlight the strength of his images by recovering them clearly through the work of a careful and modern print to obtain copies in all their splendor and which, devoid of any artifice, are show frontally to challenge us through the vision they offer us.