With the strokes of a veteran of illustration and graphic design, Susanna Martín, and with a reliable story by the journalist Jordi de Miguel, the editorial office of the Barcelona City Council has just released ‘Stories of the Model‘, first number of a collection with which it is intended, rigorously and without syrups, turn into a comic a past of this city that should never be forgotten. As appropriate, the book has been presented within the walls of that prison that, despite its name, was never a model and, what is worse, was never a Barcelona Bastille. Thus begins with the Model a collection with the municipal seal that is already on the agenda a second volume, in this case dedicated to the rent strike of 1931.
La Modelo opened its doors (well, that is a perhaps inappropriate expression) in June 1904 and emptied its last cells in 2017, that is, the book summarizes, which is not easy and yet it succeeds, 113 years of a always harrowing story. The publication coincides, for example, with the premiere in theaters of ‘Modelo 77’, which is capable of dedicating an hour and a half of footage to just a few months of the life of this prison, to that moment when the winds of freedom that seemed to blow during the Transition did not refresh inside that penitentiary center. What Martín, in pencil, and De Miguel, at the keyboard, have achieved the opposite, not a look at an instant, but a panoramic portrait of how ashamed Barcelona should feel for having tolerated (in the middle and at the same time with its back to the Eixample) the presence of a place that, more than confinement, was almost always a place of repression and unjustifiable violencesometimes to death, by public execution or by beatings in the dark.
A leader of anarchism like Piotr Kropotkin said that any revolution that really wanted to deserve that name, revolution, should begin by demolishing the prisons with a pick and a shovel, and in Barcelona that was what the libertarian movement did with the prison of Queen Amàlia in 1936, but La Modelo survived because its solvency was more than proven to imprison the political rival in the most inhumane conditions. That is why it should be consideredthe antithesis of the Bastille and, also, a place that should not be forgotten, which is why this volume is now published.
Through various time jumps and the oral account of some ‘tenants’, such as Anna Sallés, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s partner, both imprisoned in 1962 for singing ‘Asturias patria querida’ in the streets of Barcelona when there was a protest on the Cantabrian coast Aúpa mining, the book manages to be really very immersive. Is one of the advantages of comics over photography. Very little of what happened there he was photographed with a camera. As if they were those robot portraits that the police make, it is always possible, on the contrary, to draw what happened through the voice of the witnesses.
It is often remembered, when writing about La Modelo, the oxymoronic nature of her name, that it was born with the purpose of humanizing life in prison and being a transit point for the return to life in society and ended, in reality, like the opposite. Actually, it shouldn’t be surprising. Its singular architectural form, that panoptic structure in which the prisoner would always feel watched, was an idea gestated in the mind of such a singular type as jeremy bentham, opposed to slavery when it was most common, detractor of the death penalty, also of child labor, and one of the first defenders of human rights, but strange to the core, because that thinker, father of utilitarianism, asked that, after death, his body was disembodied and the skeleton was seated in a chair, dressed and exhibited eternally in one of the rooms of University College London. There it goes.
The book recalls those origins, its use as a political weapon in different stages of the 20th century and, of course, its brutal degradation in the 70s and 80s, when the warden of the Model could say it was the drug, because it was heroin and other substances that set the operating rules. From the street it could be strange in those days that the prison yards were covered with a net. They were installed to prevent small packets of drugs from being thrown at the prisoners from the street. They got into tennis balls, so what better than a net to stop that game.
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Inventiveness always surpassed any solution. They then began to throw ice balls at each other that were trapped in the net, but, of course, as the hours passed they fell apart and the envelope with the drug ended up falling into the patio.
It is one of the chapters that the book contains, but at this point we must make a subsection and remember that at this stage, even within the genre of fiction, there is a precedent that is difficult to overcome, ‘Leak in the Model‘, perhaps the pinnacle of Barcelona’s ‘underground’ comics, a masterpiece that bears the signature of michael gallardo and Juan Mediavilla, a portrait of what that prison was much more precise than one might suppose. There is an anecdote that corroborates it. To draw the pages in which he recounted the fugue that the title announced, Gallardo, who wanted to be rigorous like a Hergé of the dodgy line, went to the Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya to see if they had any material to draw from. ideas. They provided him directly with the plans for the construction of the Model. ‘Fuga en la Modelo’ was a ‘best seller’ because it was a very crazy and funny story, but also because it showed the interior of the prison with astonishing fidelity by then standards. Today it is visitable.