La Jornada: The Madrid Student Residence exhibits the archive of the García Lorca family

Madrid. Federico García Lorca, one of the most universal poets in literature, a symbol of the resistance and barbarity of fascism and war, is still alive in our memory and his work has endured censorship and oblivion thanks, in large part, to his family’s archive.

Neither the forced exile of his brothers nor the relentless persecution of the forces addicted to the totalitarian regime of Francisco Franco in Spain prevented his word of freedom and beauty from transcending the passage of time, as witnessed in an exhibition at the Madrid Student Residence – of which Lorca himself was one of its most illustrious guests –, in which, through 400 pieces from the foundation that bears the writer’s name, this struggle to keep his figure alive is explained, but also Doors open to the future, especially that of recovering his voice in a sound recording or restoring his beautiful and vibrant musical compositions, most of which have been destroyed or lost.

In this exhibition, the recovery of the original manuscript of trip to the moonbased on recent discoveries about the Spaniard’s professional relationship with the Mexican artist Emilio Armero.

Lorca was executed in the middle of the Spanish civil war (1936-1939) for his status as a “communist, homosexual and freemason.” He was shot and buried in a mass grave in the lonely Viznar ravine, in the heart of the Granada mountain range, his homeland. Until now, the version most accepted by historians – among them Ian Gibson, Miguel Caballero and Pilar Góngora – about his death maintains that on the morning of August 18, 1936 he was transferred to an old mansion known as Las Colonias, which during the Republic served as a vacation and recreation place for humble children and that the fascist faction converted into a prison center that served as an anteroom for the prisoner’s last walk before the execution. That day he was taken to a clearing in the ravine and executed along with three other people: Professor Dióscoro Galindo and the banderilleros Francisco Galadías and Juan Arcoyas Cabezas. Since then, the poet’s mortal remains have remained missing.

The almost 40 years of dictatorship made any search or exhumation that would serve to clarify how he died impossible. And the subsequent five decades of democracy have also failed to recover the poet’s mortal remains.

But apart from the recovery of his remains, his family, scattered in forced exile between the United States and France, managed to maintain his literary mark, whether with the recovery of original documents, manuscripts of works, photographs, epistolary exchanges and countless objects that speak of the mark he left on the world. And this is how it is told in the exhibition Lorca and the archive: Memory in motionwhich brings together more than 400 pieces, many of them little known or unpublished, which were saved and preserved by family and friends of the writer during the civil war and the years of exile. The tour allows us to reconstruct the trajectory of this dispersed archive, marked by loss, conservation and recovery throughout the decades after the poet’s murder.

The exhibition follows Lorca’s legacy from his death to the present and focuses on the work, often silent, that allowed it to be preserved, first in the hands of the family, then through the Federico García Lorca Foundation.

Collective effort

The archive is not only a sum of manuscripts, letters, photographs, drawings and personal objects, but also the history of the people who made its preservation possible, which was increased with contributions from institutions from several countries, especially Mexico, Argentina, the United States and Cuba, since it is not a static collection, but a living story crossed by losses, displacements, gaps and discoveries.

Many of the materials on display had until now remained out of the public eye: “80 percent of the documents have never been seen. Their gathering allows us to better understand the collective dimension of this legacy, an archive built from the family nucleus and also thanks to an international network of collaborators. It is a story of collective effort to preserve Lorca’s work,” explained one of the curators and professor at Boston University, Christopher Maurer.

The exhibition is divided into several stages: Coup, war and rupture, which explains that after the coup d’état of 1936 and the assassination of Lorca, his manuscripts were in danger of being lost or destroyed and the odyssey of his relatives to save them is recounted.

The next section, Routes of Exile, refers to the mass expulsion caused by the civil war, which contributed to the dispersion of the Lorca legacy. Likewise, he tells how his family traveled to New York with part of the archive. Since 1937, as it is said, they tried to reunite and manage it, with the added difficulty of the war and the post-war period, but that is when it really began to have international dimensions.

In The Long Return, the third section of the exhibition, it is indicated that after the death in New York of the poet’s father, Federico García Rodríguez, in 1951 the family began a long and arduous return to a country where the Franco regime continued to hinder the publication and circulation of Lorca’s works. While their international dissemination grows, they grapple with the way in which archives and legacy should be cared for and managed in the midst of Franco’s regime.

The fourth stop, titled Paths of Opening, describes how, after Franco’s death and with the idea of ​​protecting the poet’s legacy and facilitating access to his funds, the family created a private foundation in 1984, which represents a turning point in the life of the archive. From that moment on, a space is sought to keep the records, the Student Residence being the chosen place.

The exhibition culminates with the section Towards the Future, which addresses the work of all those who guard the legacy of Federico García Lorca, such as the recordings of his voice, the original manuscripts that remain to be recovered or his musical compositions for piano.

The exhibition Lorca and the archive: Memory in motion It will be open to the public until next July 26 at the Madrid Student Residence.