It’s been one whole year since I created a month long online vigil to mark the 75th anniversary of the Retirada, the flight from Spain at the fall of the Second Republic to Franco’s fascist forces.
Two days ago I took down my work for a show called EXILIO at Wolfson College and yesterday I returned the suitcases that I had used, both for assemblage and to transport some of my paintings, back to the studios.
As I stacked these suitcases (some acquired for the Retirada project, some from the family home and some very recently purchased) I felt the excitement and joy of return.
The pile is growing. Suitcases have become iconic within the project, supplanting the blanket for the present; an item which I am sure will have it’s day but continues for now to serve a supporting role. The height of this stack is somehow pleasing.
I note that there are six suitcases now (although four more remain between places and are in use transporting items as they were made to do). Six is the magic number of my family reunited. We were four in England and two in Spain, and thus we shuttled back and forth feeling only complete when the numbers stacked up like the cases in my studio.
I look back on this year with a kind of wonder, observing how this work has revolutionised my artistic practice and transformed some of the spaces and relationships around me. I have met so many wonderful people through this project and learned that my history – what seemed like an isolated grief my father bore – was in fact a national tragedy, which uprooted and upturned the lives of half a million Spaniards and their descendants across the globe.
I’m learning too that those Spanish Republican sympathisers remaining in what my father called The Captive Land in his English translation of his play Tierra Cautiva (i.e. Spain) were also menaced and silenced. I’m learning that there are many forms of exile.
I’m also coming to know that there is no end to this kind of investigation, with new material surfacing at each turn as the national memory is sifted and exhumed bone by bone. These photographs, for example, are new to the public eye and will be shown for the first time in Pamplona. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30992883
I had thought that I would reprise my blog posts for the Retirada, first published on my FaceBook artists page, sequentially here on a-n but on reflection I know that this is not the way forward for February 2015.
The discipline of daily blog posts back in 2014 was a discrete and hugely challenging project and the work involved in disseminating it on social media is beyond my current capacity.
My work for now is both to reflect on the year gone by and continue developing my ideas – the urge is to press forward.
Blog posts on the FaceBook page can be found here though you will need to trawl through to February 2014 to find the Retirada project: https://www.facebook.com/BarcelonaInABag?ref=hl
The final visual output for the project can be seen in the gallery called Hell in the Sand on my website here:http://soniaboue.co.uk/gallery_612249.html
You can see a video of the EXILIO installation process and PV here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjTmRPXwE3w
I will spend this month of February 2015 reflecting again on the journey of this exile, walking in the footsteps of my family and sharing the process here.
Today I feel more than grateful for your presence alongside me and your witness. Readers and viewers are essential to any artist blogger, and yet in this post of all my posts since February 2014 I feel it most keenly. Your eyes and ears matter beyond words.
