Barcelona in a Bag

The work went up, guests arrived, we popped some corks and I was carried away in a sea of people – all asking questions, all showing interest in the story of my father’s exile. One even held my hand while she told me her story, and others spoke of their connectedness to this history. Many had a love for Spain, which drew them to this gathering. Some carried the burden of exile from other lands.

People I didn’t know seemed to recognise me – I suddenly realised this was because of the film Without You playing on a loop in one of the gallery spaces. The film is powerful. I know this now.

My favourite wall based piece is a copy of my father’s play, Tierra Cautiva. I do hope viewers noticed it. It was the final piece to go up, and during the install it sat patiently waiting. It’s waited for decades to be in the spotlight, so what were a few hours in comparison it seemed to say. In the final moments my fingers worked quickly, fashioning fishing wire in exactly the right places first time. Even the length needed no adjustment.

It was a wonderful PV, and I was quite astonished by the feedback. It’s an extraordinary thing putting up a show. At one point I wondered how this was happening to me? Did I do all this?

It’s the question I had privately asked myself when the hang was done. Somehow installing the work in a public space changes it. It’s suddenly not about your relationship to these pieces, but everyone else’s. There’s a strange detachment and mild sense of surprise about the origins of all this stuff! The studio is a very different environment, enclosed and interior. So I was pleased the work stood up to transfer to this new place, in which gorgeous vistas open out to where the river Cherwell greets the college lawns. That’s quite a view to deal with, especially when showing landscapes.

All the comments I received were so welcome, yet laced with poignancy for me. Perhaps this is the origin of the two day migraine I’m currently nursing. This was the kind of response my father longed for as a playwright – more than anything else. He didn’t want the exiles to be forgotten and suffered acutely from a deaf ears reception to his work. This affected him very badly.

So in all my joy in beginning to share this narrative more widely, there is also sadness and irony running through it all. Such conflicts often result in physical pain – the well known somatisation of the psychological.

This I am regarding as the aftermath and well worth it. I hope Dad is watching somewhere and finally having a ball.

How the sands fly!
The child runs behind.
Sweeping and sweeping.
Gathering and gathering.
In the pockets of her apron.
A mad impulse from a dream.
Come brave souls!
We’ll work it out.

One permeable pocket,
A lose thread chasing truths.
Each grain captured,
Stolen by the wind.

More distant than ever.
Buried with bones and ashes.
What use borrowed memory!
Only to bewitch,
To play with ghosts.
A moment, nothing more.

Yet follow and follow.
Pursue the remains.
Flying sands must rest.
If only a single grain,
Finds peace.

Searching and searching.
You sift the sands.

Searching and searching.
Seeking repair.

Abandoned crimes,
Leave a bitter stain.

So come brave souls!
We’ll lend compassion.
Tears cleanse
And swell her apron,
Forming a finger in the dyke
And grain by grain
The child will hold back time.

Sonia Boué 2014

Artists have to write blurbs for shows. Come and see ours!

EXILE:

Jonathan Moss and Sonia Boué met by chance at Magdalen Road Studios in the Summer of 2013. Jonathan was at the end of his eight year project Are There Any People There? A creative investigation culminating in an artist’s book of haunting black and white photographs of the remains of the Rivestaltes internment camp, where Spanish refugees were held at the fall of Republican Spain. Sonia had just begun, Barcelona in a Bag, a profound investigation into a hidden family history steeped in that same Spanish conflict. This is what happened.

I had undertaken a short residency at the Magdalen Road Studios’ project space, FILAMENT 14, to develop Barcelona in a Bag when Jonathan passed by on his first day at the studios, and peered in at the growing collage of poetry, photographs and documentary writing, pasted to the walls. My grandmothers’ handbag held court in the centre of the room and seemed to take on new powers of conversation whispering messages about where to place the objects I was working with in my careful recreation of the past. The handbag, recently inherited, had opened a Proustian cache of golden memories about my childhood journeys to Spain, and yet while the project began as a joyful evocation of time, person and place, I began to learn that I had stumbled on what felt like broken glass at the deep end of the memory pool.

That very day I had added a short piece of oral testimony, newly gathered in urgent conversations with my mother about my father and grandparents’ involvement in the war – a topic silenced by the muzzle of the fascist dictator Franco, and the trauma they had gone through rendering them virtually mute on the subject. This newly pinned sheet contained but a fragment of the story, yet it’s power to shock, once absorbed, was enough to induce a proper bedridden dose of ‘flu at the close of my residency. It told first of my grandparents’ internment in France, and then of a night spent in a field to avoid a Nazi round-up of Spaniards, while living in exile in Angoulême. I hadn’t known.

Jonathan was the first person to tell me about the punishing conditions of internment, also that it was highly probable my grandparents were held at Rivesaltes in the first instance. Reeling from the synergy that brought us to this uncanny juncture we parted a little dazed – Jonathan was to return to France to pack up his home and come to live in Oxford and had only been installing his equipment in his studio space for his return after the long Summer break.

Meeting Jonathan was an important catalyst to my work, my first introduction to the powerful undercurrents involved in my quest to uncover and subsequently honour family history. I also admired his work very much. As my project progressed and Jonathan returned to the studios coincidence and confluence grew. The very next work to be shown in the project space after the Barcelona in a Bag residency were the photographs from Are There Any People There? Jonathan had also created a series of abstract painterly and video responses; while alongside my object work, my painting practice was re-emerging. We are also both research based artist, sharing a fascination with history, place and atmosphere. We talked about exhibiting together and began a series of conversations over coffee, strengthening our resolve. When the opportunity arose to make a video, Without You I Would not Exist about my father’s rescue from Le Barcarès camp in the Summer of 2014, Jonathan’s input was to prove vital in interpreting my script. Within this tribute to the Quaker who saved my father, Jonathan also skilfully cameo’d performance pieces and documented my practice. In this film I see the narrative I’m working with through Jonathan’s acute eye and gain a new perspective.

Wolfson College Gallery provides the first opportunity for a joint showing of works. https://www.facebook.com/events/438997596251351/?ref_dashboard_filter=upcoming

Sonia Boué, Arena y Mar, mixed media on canvas, 2014

For the first time next week I will exhibit alongside Jonathan Moss in a show entitled EXILE, which focuses on the internment camps of France in which Spanish exiles were held captive at the fall of Spain in 1939. We’ll be showing abstract landscapes and videos; I’ll create a pop-up installation for the Private View. It will also be the first time I show these particular works in a public space beyond my studio.

I won’t list all the elements that have stacked against me in the run up to the show – suffice to say that significant others have been called away to New York, washing machines have created copious fountains mid-wash, and certain family members have developed sudden and pressing needs for additional support – all of which leave my to-do list unattended.

These days, whenever obstacles are put in my path in the course of my work, I recall the exile experience. 76 years ago members of my family were subjected to such terror and hardship that washing machine malfunction fades into complete insignificance. What luxury! I have water – it’s not in the right place but it’s clean and literally on tap. The show will go up – it has to, to honour their memory.

There’s also the tendency to prevaricate one must deal with. Is blogging right now a displacement activity? What about that list? Well no. I need to write about why I’m choosing not to sell my work this time round, and why instead I’m choosing to keep this growing body of work around the theme of my father’s exile safeguarded. You see this work is made from the inside. It’s outward expression has no monetary value that I can or want to place on it. The work has to stay pure and mustn’t scatter. As my dear friend Brent remarked – the work has to stay together until you’ve told the story – and he’s right.

I have to take the long view on these particular pieces, and I’m ambitious for them. I want these paintings to travel. That’s it, I’ve said it right there. These paintings have a yearning to go home to the place of my origins. Spain. Obstacles will surely come my way – not least of which will be finding a location where this work will be welcomed, and yet I know this place has to exist. Spanish politics with the longstanding issue of contested memory presents a hefty spanner in the works of this dream. Important to say it though.

Meanwhile, because artist’s have to live and should be paid, commissions will be gladly taken.