react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

In her recent book on Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a British logistics worker with the Partit Obrer d'Unificació Marxista (POUM) during the Spanish Civil War, Anna Funder examines a passage from George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia in which Eileen sits alone in the Hotel Continental's lobby at night. Located on the major promenade of Las Ramblas in Barcelona, the hotel occupies a central location in a zone scarred by conflict and was a site of skirmishes during the war (1936-1939), acting at various moments as an avenue for collective movement, a no-man’s-land in street battles, and a space to be defended. Thinking about Eileen moving through the city, I respond to Anderson-Cleary’s discussion of representations of women by the Spanish left to consider how we might imagine milicianas and other women active in the war as being present on the frontlines and the city streets together.