American Marconi Wireless News - Footballers play with Franco head at Spain art festival

The "La Copa del Generalisimo" performance, subversively taking the name of a tournament played during Franco's iron grip on the country from 1939 to 1975, comes as Spain marks the 50th anniversary of his death.

The experimental "Ex Abrupto" art festival pitted two teams against each other for a self-styled "anti-fascist fixture" in Moia, around 50 kilometres (31 miles) north of Barcelona.

The choice of pitch was also highly symbolic, close to former trenches used by the defeated republican side in the 1936-1939 civil war that brought Franco to power after his coup.

The recreated hyper-realistic head was fashioned by the Indecline group and Eugenio Merino, an artist whose work has tackled Franco and the right-wing dictatorship on several occasions.

He attracted attention more than a decade ago with "Always Franco", a life-sized representation of the general in a refrigerator that sparked an uproar at Madrid's ARCO art festival in 2012.

Merino courted controversy again with "Punching Franco", a work that used the dictator's head as a punching ball.

The Francisco Franco Foundation, which works to promote the late dictator's legacy, lodged complaints against both works that were rejected by the courts.

Merino used the same mould for the resin and silicone-covered head which was the protagonist of Thursday's match.

"It's the 50th anniversary of Franco's death and I thought it was necessary to commemorate" it, Merino told local radio RAC 1.

"We recover that idea of the people that plays and enjoys, and we also recover the idea of anti-fascism."

The game, which only allowed limited spectator numbers, was recorded for broadcast on Friday and Saturday in a bar in Moia, while the head can be visited in a local museum.

Merino and Indecline had already teamed up to send political messages, using the recreated head of Donald Trump to play football at the wall on the US-Mexico border and one of Brazil's rightist former president Jair Bolsonaro.

P.Martin--AMWN