The Drunkmen’s Marseillaise

Two summer trips around Spain converge in La marsellesa de los borrachos. The first, in 1961, was undertaken by the group Cantacronache: a group from Turin (linked to names such as Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco) who travelled to the north of Spain to record and internationalise popular resistance songs. More than 9,000 feet of clandestinely collected tapes were compiled in the publication Canti della nuova resistenza spagnola (Songs of New Spanish Resistance). The Franco regime sought to discredit their authors by disseminating a pamphlet mocking them under the title ‘La marsellesa de los borrachos’ (The Marseillaise of the Drunkards). The second journey takes place in 2022 under the direction of Pablo Gil Rituerto, who brings together voices from the past and the present in an exercise of reconstructing oral memory. Emilio Jona, the only living witness of the 1961 voyage, takes on the guiding voice of this new adventure, which follows in the footsteps of those revolutionary men and revives their spirit in contemporary times. Using archive sound recordings, musicians such as Nacho Vegas, María Arnal, Amorante and Labregos do tempo dos Sputniks reinterpret the songs that demonstrate the undeniable link between the political history of a country and its geography.