Lucila Mallart:
Archiving the Nation, Undermining the State: The Iconographic Repertoire of Spain (1914-1929)

In the 1910s, Catalan architects Josep Puig i Cadafalch and Jeroni Martorell conceived the Iconographic Repertoire of Spain, an ambitious, publicly-funded project to create a visual and "scientific" archive of the nation's art. During the following two decades, the Repertoire amassed over 100,000 records, encompassing everything from Iberian and Roman remains to Golden Age painting, folk arts, and colonial art in Cuba, the Philippines, and Morocco. Despite the survival of these archives, scholarly research on them remains limited. This paper addresses this gap by examining the archival methodologies and national identity discourses embedded within the Repertoire. Building on theories that link photo archives to national identity formation, it investigates how the project re-imagined the contours of Spanish (and Catalan) identity through its expansive, transnational scope.

Lucila Mallart is a cultural and art historian of modern Europe. She earned her PhD from the University of Nottingham (2016) and currently holds a Ramón y Cajal Research Fellowship at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Her research explores the role of visual culture, urban planning, public exhibitions, and knowledge devices in the making of national identities in modern Spain. She currently leads the research project VISART, which uses computer vision tools to study photo archives, and collaborates with the National Museum of Art of Catalonia to disseminate her research on the Iconographic Repertoire of Spain. Her work has appeared in journals and with publishers such as Cultural History, Urban History, Nations and Nationalism, Oxford University Press, Routledge and Peter Lang. She is currently a scientific guest at the Photothek until 26 October 2025.