Pilar Martin |
Madrid (EFE).- Death as an engine for life and for the search for formulas that lead to a happier and better society: is the cry present in the exhibition “The democratic skylight”, an exhibition that challenges through art what is already known about the history of Spain and is “clearly committed to a radical idea of citizen democracy”.
This was stated to EFE by Germán Labrador, curator of this event subtitled “Life and death policies in the Spanish State (1868-1976)” and which can be seen in the exhibition space La Arquería (Madrid) until July 23.
With the premise that “objectivity exists neither in art nor in history,” according to Labrador, the story that “El tragaluz democrático” offers the visitor is about the “experiences” of the “defeated, of those who have been the object of persecution, of those who have suffered.”
But the exhibition does not place these citizens as victims, but as “resisters”, as “people who have opposed the injustices of an era, who have faced the economic and political interests of governments” with the aim of building better societies.
A visual story told through 266 original works
Exactly what the writer Antonio Buero Vallejo proposes in the work that gives its name to the exhibition, where, explains the curator, he addresses that pain and suffering are part of a “network that is articulated through political structures, and what we have to take care of is that the strands of that network are healthy, alive, that they can be reunited”.
An idea that materializes in canvases such as “Seis jovenes” (1975) by Juan Genovés, “La apparition” (1946) by José Guerrero, “Ronda de nenos” (1943) by Alfonso Rodríguez Castelao, or in a mask of a ‘ peliqueiro’ from the Galician carnival painted with an ocean liner with a republican flag, which shows a “moment of a cultural development of the importation of ideas, in this case from Argentina”.
Other links on the tour are the olive pits carved by prisoners or a piece as singular as “Vitamino”, a doll made of bread crumbs made by a Cuban international brigade prisoner who was arrested and imprisoned in Porlier, a prison that functioned during the Civil War. Civil and the postwar period in the Madrid street that bears the name of General Díaz Porlier.
And also the banner that Lauro Olmo put up in his house to fight against his eviction in 1972 and which are part of a mature story about dissidence, opposition and daily practices over the last hundred and fifty years.
“The democratic skylight” is a visual story told through 266 original works from 71 providers, all national, and which is complemented by a large number of photographic and 11 audiovisual reproductions.
A journey through the layers of history in the exhibition “The democratic skylight”
It is also a sample of how art and any cultural manifestation served, even in the worst moments (such as when bread was almost the only food) as a mechanism to build hope and beauty.
“The exhibition -says the curator- defies many of the expectations about Spanish history and the past in many ways. We think we know some things, we have some ideas about the Civil War, about the Franco regime, but history is full of layers of complexity, of stories that repeat themselves and that come back. This exhibition confronts us with what we think we know about the Spanish past and opens it in unexpected directions that take us far back in memory”.
Organized by the Ministry of the Presidency, Relations with the Courts and Democratic Memory and Spanish Cultural Action, “The democratic skylight” thus proposes an in-depth journey through those layers that make up the history of Spain and also “dissolves” the “centrality” of the Spanish civil war in the pages of our past.