Ifni. Catalan military service in Africa

This exhibition explores the experiences of young Catalan conscripts who were stationed in Ifni, a small Spanish enclave on the southern coast of Morocco, not far from the colony in the Sahara. Together with “Ikunde. Barcelona, colonial metropole”, the exhibition is part of a series that calls into question and reviews our colonial past.

Occupied during the Second Republic, in 1934, the territory had no important natural resources, let alone any strategic role in an international context, that would justify an occupation that continued until it was returned to Morocco in 1969.

Impoverished and marginalised, the territory of Ifni served as a base for recruiting native forces as well as a presidio, a punishment destination, for hundreds of republicans in the early post-civil-war period. Many young Spanish conscripts did their military service there.

Based on the African military-service stories of Catalan veterans, the exhibition explores personal stories full of loathing and nostalgia. These testimonies are organised around a series of demands that have fallen on deaf ears, perhaps because they speak of an uncomfortable past that hardly anyone wishes to remember.