Todo

Todo is a mixed-media project that explores the reminiscences of fascism in contemporary Spain; reminiscences on society, reminiscences on the landscape, reminiscences on myself. Archive materials and original imagery work together to connect the past and the present.

The history of Spain was rewritten several times until all the parts that the Regime found inconvenient were erased. Spain has forgotten its past several times, sometimes willingly and sometimes forcefully. The pact of oblivion was the price to transition to democracy, and the horrors of the war and the posterior dictatorship were hidden behind thick walls of silence and shame. Historical facts in contemporary Spanish history are ambiguous and intrinsically shaped by ideology and conflict.

When my Grandfather was four, his parents took him and his sisters and put him in a boat that went to France to be safe while Spain was at war. He didn’t see his parents for a few years, until the conflict was over. He told me he remembered being in a bed bunker with his sisters, in some kind of pavilion, surrounded by hundreds of beds and hundreds of kids, many of them orphans. My Grandfather was a niño de la guerra, a kid from war, one of those hundreds of kids that had to exiliate to survive. Some of them never came back. I am lucky that the worst thing that happened to my family during the war and the dictatorship is that they survived.

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

Federico García Lorca