Manchester writer Tom Branfoot was selected for the 2026 Vil·la Joana Residency in Barcelona UNESCO City of Literature.

Tom spent three weeks researching and responding to the work of Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies. He has shared his reflections on the experience in this special guest post.

If I’d have been told sooner that Jacint Verdaguer, one of the most famous Catalan poets, had died in the villa we were staying, I might have felt differently about the villa. Two weeks into the residency at Villa Joana nestled in the Collserola mountains with a view of Montserrat from the terrace, we were led round the place by an incredible guide, who showed us the museum which only opened twice a week. It was an incredible museum devoted to literature and focussing on the life of this peasant poet-priest who won a poetry competition aged twenty and came to be regarded as the founder of modern Catalan literature. Our guide took us to the bedroom where Verdaguer died and showed us the original sickbed.

Thankfully, I wasn’t haunted by a disembodied voice singing the ‘Virolai’. Yet it was strange living in museum, particularly coming home after a few vi blanc and being greeted by an empty information desk. Wandering through the stark space before reaching the tiled stairs to the living quarters – all while being watched by a bust of the poet-priest – felt absurdly wonderful.

As it happened, my research involved communing with many ghosts of Barcelona’s past. Some of whom, like the artist Antoni Tàpies – whose work and politics my project centred around – died naturally, and others who were executed under Franco’s brutally repressive regime.

One afternoon on an industrial port, I sat before an imposing parapet erected as a monument to the executed between 1939 to 1952. It was during the back end of that period when abstract art was being mobilised as a political tool by the regime through the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Bienalle. At the Bienalle in 1952, artworks were exhibited by young artists including Tàpies and Guinovart anticipating the success of art informel as a distinctively “Spanish” modernism.

As Agar Ledo Arias writes ‘Abstraction thereby became the correct language for opposing the realist aesthetics of communism, and for representing the new Francoist aesthetic’. These artists – like Tàpies who later became a Marxist committed to Catalan independence – were used as pawns by the fascist dictatorship to project a liberal image of Spain onto the world stage. By doing so, the regime was aligning the nation’s cultural output with avant-garde practices developing in the USA and Europe; practices diametrically opposed to Socialist Realism in a cold war cultural strategy designed to improve Spain’s reputation all the while imposing a hostile environment for dissidents.

Antoni Tàpies’ art is difficult to explain, but as someone who works within an innovative poetic mode, difficulty can be one of the most rewarding aspects of art: an insurgent state in which variables art kept alive. Base materials take on a philosophical resonance in his practice: for example, when straw is used in his matter paintings, it vibrates on a Biblical frequency, recalling the nativity, and also the peasantry which underpins Catalan national identity. Paint is mixed with rough material such as dirt and marble dust, whose composition alone which makes one consider how classical art is being overturned and pulverised in these artworks. And somewhere in each piece, a cross is etched or painted; a universal symbol: of death and rebirth, a symbol of addition, multiplication, a meeting place and a signature.

In the bustling Eixample district of Barcelona known for its modernist architecture and melting Gaudi facades sits the Museu Tàpies. An imposing building and former publishing house with a tangled mesh of wire on its roof, visible from the street. The organisers of the residency organised a pass for the gallery allowing me to enter as often as I liked and set up a tour led by the librarian. When the museum was established, it was deemed necessary to have a public library so that citizens of Barcelona could benefit from the same galvanising experience of literature and philosophy as Tàpies did from his sickbed in a sanatorium, an experience which shaped the young artist. The library is built inside the old storeroom of the publishers, which seemed appropriate enough; a glass wall separates the austere gallery space from the mahogany shelving and warm light. It was here that I began my research into Tàpies’ art and life and politics.

Like Tàpies, I believe in abstraction as a form of political commitment. Abstraction allows one to communicate in a militant tenor, bypassing censors by speaking in a symbolic language that must be interpreted. ‘Art must live it’s truth’, Tàpies writes, ‘[i]f I paint the way I paint, first of all it’s because I am Catalan. But, like so many others, I am affected by the political drama of Spain as a whole… In my painting I want to inscribe all my country’s difficulties, even if I cause displeasure: suffering, painful experiences, prison, a gesture of revolt.’ As such, abstract art and poetry refuse to be conventionally understood, positioning themselves against flattening, hegemonic structures such as fascism. Considering art as a gesture of revolt, it is the role of the artist to be that vessel, to witness and confront social and political turmoil and translate brutal realities into fierce forms.

The result of my residency is a long, experimental collage poem which responds to his artworks, the political conditions out of which they emerged, and his development as a politically-committed artist – the turning point of which was his involvement in the student democracy lock-in at a monastery known as La Caputxinada; it was here that Tàpies was arrested with other students, artists and academics whose fines he paid by selling his own paintings. Through these biographical, ekphrastic pieces are woven my own personal experience of the city, of being away from my fiancé and living through another blazing, volatile summer. The poem is organised into prose sections of various sizes, blocked out like artworks on a gallery wall, and elliptical lyrical fragments. At its core, the poem examines the particular way of knowing and documenting experience which results from an artistic life and considers how art can operate as a gesture of revolt.

The Villa Joana residency gave me an incredible experience of a city, and the time to fully understand a remarkable Catalan modernist artist and the conditions from which his work emerged. It gave me time to develop a new form for a new mode of thinking, and to edit my second collection of poetry, in which this piece belongs. I am grateful to all the organisers and culture workers in the city during a time of festivals and celebrations, especially those library workers on strike – may they get their demands met.

An unforgettable highlight of my trip was an event in the cathedral square called the Bombing of the Poems. An artistic performance to celebrate fifty years since Franco’s death and the transition to democracy; that evening in 1975, so I was told, Barcelona ran out of cava, and corks could be heard ricocheting through the city. Back in the present, a helicopter hovered over Plaça Nova, an area which was severely disfigured from fascist bombing campaigns during the Civil War. Yet this time, it was 100,000 bookmark-sized prints of poems from Catalan and Chilean authors which were falling from the sky, not explosives. I had never seen that amount of people be moved and move for poetry; throughout the crowd, arms were reaching into the sky for poems, people were shaking trees loose of them after the happening. It was especially emotional considering how aerial violence was being recast as collective wonder. The poems chosen were ones that spoke to freedom, liberating the dusk like swifts.

About Tom Branfoot

Tom Branfoot is a poet and critic from Bradford, and the writer-in-residence at Manchester Cathedral. His poetry has been described by Fran Lock as possessing a “mercurial intelligence that alchemizes everything it touches”. Branfoot’s work is archival, enigmatic and interested in the connections between nature and politics. The common thread running through his poetry is the question of how we can imagine the world differently. Awards include a Northern Writers’ Award in 2024 and the New Poets Prize 2022. In 2025, he was awarded an Arts Council Develop Your Creative Project grant to work on a novel in progress and was a finalist for the Forward Prize for best individual poem. 

Branfoot is the author of three poetry pamphlets : I’ll Splinter, This Is Not an Epiphany, and boar . His debut full-length collection, Volatile , is forthcoming from The 87 Press . He organises and presents the More Song poetry reading series in Bradford, which has served as a platform for internationally renowned poets as well as championing local talent.