At 84, he claims how liberating it is to have a good time. “A good party is very calming. It’s a bath that renews the body and the spirit”, points out this artist born in Amposta (Montsià) from her flat in the left Eixample of Barcelona, close to Sant Antoni. On the walls are hung his undulating poems painted in watercolor, some of his paintings from his youth and photos with friends that are both altar and talisman. “I can’t go to many parties anymore because I don’t go out much and I’m more tired than I’d like”, she laments.
A pioneer of the poetic rebellion that flourished during the Transition, Chordà did not only paint, write and sculpt for a free femininity and outside the validation of the canon. Daughter of the owners of a haberdashery, educated by Catholic nuns and part of the Francoist resistance for which she was sanctioned to not be able to teach drawing classes again, the artist also defended a free and unconventional sexuality, walking the streets, bringing women together. After opening Lo Llar, a venue for concerts and exhibitions in Amposta so beloved that even the Civil Guard turned a blind eye to the projections ofThe battleship Potemkin in the midst of Francoism, Chordá founded the LaSal café, the first feminist bar in Spain, alongside Carme Cases, María José Quevedo, Sat Sabater and Montse Solà. They settled there in June 1977 in Carrer Riereta d’un Raval, which was then the Chinatown. A few months later, the first feminist publishing house in Spain would arrive, LaSal Edicions de les donnes, a miracle that would end up publishing hundreds of transcendental women of our reading life.
The publishing house Godall has republished first in Catalan and now in bilingual format, with a Spanish translation by Isabel Navarro, , one of the titles that started the LaSal legend. With poems and calligraphed texts by Chordà, accompanied by illustrations by , that publication that sold out in the weeks following the 1978 Sant Jordi festival would go on to be reprinted ten times and his sentences resonate as well as they did almost half a century ago: “Sometimes we forget that we have a body to do more things than put the clothes in the washing machine or bathe the children”.
Ask. In 1978 this notebook was published without authorship. “This belongs to each and every one”, proclaimed inside. Why didn’t you sign it?
Response. At that time we were all doing pineapple, we wanted to get out of the jo to focus on the we. Then we understood that we needed to put the name so that others could find us. To get to know us and recognize us. There was a very feminist and very young euphoria.
P. This is where that expression of his comes from, that the feminists of the seventies were “30-year-old teenagers”.
R. That sense of youth we had was almost childlike. We had lived through a darkness so deep, so closed and so dominated by Francoism, that being able to breathe was something incredible. We felt immense happiness and that made us very brave.
P. Is that why you set up a bar before publishing?
R. When you hang out with a lot of women, you end up wanting to do more. We had all participated in the , and we almost always met in an impressive flat in Sarrià [es refereix a la casa de l’enginyera i feminista Laura Tremosa]. The bar arose from the need to meet, to have a good time, to advise each other and to talk freely.
P. You were in charge of the cultural programming of the and managed the mythical performance from Les Nyakes, in which a woman is seen scrubbing the floor, on her knees, while the rest of the women laugh.
R. The Nyakes came looking for me because they had read me and explained that they wanted to do something. So they put on a , took brooms and other cleaning pots and sneaked into the paranymph of the University of Barcelona in one of the talks, to clean up the speakers When they removed the dust from Lidia Falcón, she got very angry, got up indignantly and shouted: “But what did you think this was?”. The rest of the women clapped in delight.
P. who wrote about these days and how not all feminists went along, labeled Lidia Falcón bourgeois.
R. Of course we weren’t all together. There were 4,000 women in those days! Women overflowed the aisles, sat on the floor, there was an incredible energy. The men neither came nor were supposed to come. . They were all women. I, for example, did not agree with Montserrat Roig and we almost always argued. She was a very good writer, a very determined woman, but I saw her and her group as pawns. I considered them very important in writing and speaking, but then I never saw them on the street.
P. Why the Raval?
R. for money It was the only place we could afford. Even my father left me some money to help with the investment and then I paid it back little by little. Then we had everything at a very good price, in there, and the neighbors knew it and came to make a quick coffee of the day. We wouldn’t get rich. We organized weekly dinners at 125 pesetas, with a price tag, for the women to talk about various topics, from agriculture to poetry.
P. You also offered information to help those who wanted to have an abortion in secret.
R. Yes, if a woman wanted an abortion, she was helped or given information on how to do so. There was a system to connect women with the necessary resources, we had a lawyer at their disposal and then there was the bookstore, where we offered a lot of reading. It was very good for us to have the Sant Antoni market next door, from there we rescued books from forgotten women, no one paid any attention to it.
P. One of his first titles published in the publishing house was The Bolshevik in loveof the revolutionary. Quite a statement of intent.
R. Kolontai was already translated into Spanish, but we created a collection imitating the graphic style and size of the novels “for women”. If you looked at it from the outside, it looked like one of those books for mothers of the time. And it was no lie! It was a rosy novel, of a very passionate love. It worked very, very well for us. We published up to 10 editions!
P. He has lived many lives and stages. How is it, that the artistic system legitimized it in 2015 when it was included in his paintings The Great Vagina i Coitus Pop in one of his exhibitions?
R. Well, it made me very angry, it’s a disaster to have to depend on the fact that they legitimize you. I took advantage of it, of course, because between everything and nothing, I had to take advantage of it. I assumed that my work had to be in places and be seen, that it couldn’t stay in the studio dead in disgust. The worst were the gallerists, who almost all called me to bring my work. They paid me little for what they earned by selling any of my stories. Now I price based on how well people like me. I also really like working with museums.
P. How do you see contemporary feminism?
R. I have hope, a few years ago a very good energy came back. I heard it at Ca la Dona, which is an incredible space in Barcelona for women to meet and where many parties were held, my favorite moments because I have already worked a lot in this life. But the last few times I went there, I didn’t see any young girls there anymore. I feel like feminists today have forgotten that they can have a great time together.
Notebook of the body and water
Mari Chordà and Montse Clavé
Godall
62 pages. 28 euros
