RIVERS (Traversing the Lorca Archive)

One of the first images of movement that we encounter in relation to Federico García Lorca is prior to humanity. It is water, which implicitly bears the possibility of constant movement and circulation and resistance to containment. It can acquire numerous forms. “It’s the same if it’s river or geyser”, said the poet in one of his Suites. It can also be a water source or spring, moving from a stream to a canal, a tributary to the sea, a pond to a glass of water.

The bubbling sound of water traverses Lorca’s life journey towards a kind of ‘desired city’. It traverses the poet’s spaces, sometimes his own body experiences it. Water, the symbol of beginning since the pre-Socratic thinkers, is inseparable from Lorca’s birthplace. The poet took his first steps in a place “kissed with moisture” and was aware very early on of that aquatic circulation. Water traverses his work, becoming a kind of growing catalogue of images of movement, whilst he walks beside canals and fountains, crosses rivers or seas.

Rivers (Traversing the Lorca Archive) is an exhibition built around Lorca’s relationship with water (of different densities, tones, speeds, and rhythms) which begins and ends in Granada, via Madrid, Barcelona, New York, Havana, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo. The exhibition explores the Lorca Archive in six sections, as if it were a diary, where the traces of water in Lorca’s documents act as a guide, with its riverbanks, mouths, floods, concealments, undergrowth, places, and times that emerge, permeate, change morphology, and accompany Lorca, setting the rhythm of water like a pulse.

The exhibition is also a proposal for interpreting the archive and is the result of a way of traversing and ‘reorganizing’ it, transcending the idea of storage, collection, accumulation, or of a site inhabited by fixed, orderly, classified, and immovable objects. The symbol of the river, understood here as a spiral that is at the same time source, course, and sea, allows us to establish parallels with the archive and its time periods, and acts as a tool for handling it as well as a means to reconsider it. Indeed, the Lorca Archive traverses places, contexts, images, and texts, and is at once source and destination, embodying an uncontainable time that contains others. Like the river, the archive is a conduit that transmits, channels, and communicates different agents, permitting the circulation of information and allowing interactions between authors who work in a contemporary context and the recent past, as well as crisscrossing with the visitor’s experience. The documents that emerge from what we might term a ‘classification-state’ are now accompanied by artistic pieces from the ‘archives’ and interventions expressly carried out by Lucía Bayón, Javi Cruz-Andrés Izquierdo, Carlos Irijalba, Alex Reynolds, and María Salgado, as well as in the essays contained in the exhibition catalogue. These corridors through the archive flow into a sea that “is dancing on the beach”, as Lorca put it.

Francisco Ramallo