Todo

2021-2022

“In Spain the dead are more alive than the dead of any other place in the world: their profile cuts like the edge of a barber’s razor.” Federico García Lorca

When my grandfather was four years old, his parents put his sibilings and him in a boat that was departing for France, to keep them safe while Spain was in the midst of civil war. He didn’t see his parents until the conflict was over, several years later. He once told me of a clear memory that he’d kept from that time: sitting in a bunker with his sisters, surrounded by hundreds of beds, and hundreds of kids, so many of them orphans. He was a niño de la guerra - a child of the war - one of thousands of children who were exiled for survival. My family was lucky; many of them never returned.

Todo is a mixed-media project that incorporates both new imagery and archival materials in order to connect the past and the present, and explore the lingering memory of fascism in contemporary Spain. My country’s history has been rewritten time and time again, and many historical facts deemed inconvenient to the Regime, or to the subsequent transition to democracy, have either been hidden behind thick walls of silence and shame or erased entirely. Spain has forgotten its past several times - sometimes willingly, sometimes forcefully – and even today facts and truths remain ambiguous and intrinsically shaped by ideology and conflict within Spanish history. Yet this memory is ever present; in its landscape, in its imagery, in society, in family, and even in myself.