The exhibition “The Wandering Body” recovers an apparently lost memory of the Spanish republicans exiled during the Franco dictatorship through a practically unpublished heritage made up of documents, objects, images and testimonies that remained hidden.
Now they see the light in this exhibition carried out within the “Memory Maps” project of the UNED, in collaboration with the Secretariat of State for Democratic Memory, and which can be seen at the Casa de América in Madrid.
Jorge Moreno Andrés and Julián López García, curators of the exhibition, were in charge of carrying out the investigation that culminates in a narrative divided into two parts, which seeks “a relationship between the visitor and the exhibition through gestures,” says Moreno.
Spanish civilians, soldiers, women and children fled to countries such as France, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela or Cuba during the years of the Franco dictatorship. “The Wandering Body” collects their stories in a different experience that takes the audience into the reality of that time through the five senses.
“The density of sentimental and emotional communication is complemented by the density of political communication, although clandestine,” says Moreno about the room with copies of the 1,500 letters sent by María Fernández to her exiled son in Mexico, Manuel Laguna.
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Decades of correspondence that tell “how the events of the days mix with the events of the politics that are being experienced, his desires to be with his son in Mexico, his impossibility because he has a son here and another there who are twins.”
Within the framework of this exhibition, the curators emphasize the key role of women as transmitters of memory. “They are the ones that have maintained a kind of craftsmanship of the stories of who we are,” says Moreno.
After “entering a forest of memories,” visitors reach the last room: “The attic of the exiles that does not accumulate dust, because it is constantly revisited,” says López.
Both anthropologists have been developing long-term research for 15 years that is working on post-war violence, on memory and violence. And it is within this general framework where “The Wandering Body” sneaks in, discovering the testimonies of the greatest exodus in the history of Spain.
With information from EFE
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