Prison cells built during the Spanish Civil War were designed as “psycho-technical” torture chambers inspired by the work of surrealist painter Salvador Dali and abstract artists Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, among others. The Military Information Service of the Spanish Republican Army contracted Alphonse Laurencic, a French citizen of Slovenian heritage to design the cells, meant to hold known or suspected Nationalists who were aligned with General Franco’s fascist forces. Laurencic was an artist, musician, and architect as well as an anarchist and member of the National Confederation of Workers. The cells were built inside Catholic churches by forced laborers who first stripping out all religious iconography before construction. The jails were called ‘Chekas’ in honor of the original Soviet secret police organization because the USSR was providing support to the Republican government at the time. At least three Chekas were built between 1937 and 1939, in the Santa Úrsula convent in Valencia and the churches on Vallmajor and Zaragoza streets in Barcelona. The tiny beds were tilted at 20-degree angles so that prisoners would slide off onto the floor if they ever fell asleep, and some rooms had a very high, angled chair which was impossible to sit on. The floors themselves were covered with a random pattern of standing bricks meant to keep the prisoner from walking or lying down. Green and red flashing lights would wear them down mentally, and the walls were painted with geometric patterns intended to provoke dizziness and visual discomfort. Prisoners could also hear an amplified metronome which moved at varying speeds and were kept within sight of a clock that ran too fast, all to further disorient them. After General Franco’s forces claimed victory over the Republicans, the new government put Laurencic on trial in front of a military tribunal, and he was executed in 1939. His work on the prison cells was largely unknown for more than 60 years, until art historian Jose Milicua uncovered a document summarizing Laurencic’s trial. #spain #civilwar #surrealism #modernism #bauhaus