(This text was presented at SAVAC, South Asian Visual Artists Centre, in Toronto, Canada, on February 28th 2019, as part of my exhibition Las cosas que se quedan // The things that remain)
Between 1929 and 1930, Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca was writing an impossible play, El Publico, often translated as “The Public” or “The Audience”. As with his other plays, Lorca read passages out loud to friends and then typed a new manuscript containing changes resulting from his friends’ feedback. He did this several times but it is uncertain whether he ever finished the play.
When Lorca saw the rise of fascism in Europe and specifically in Spain, he became concerned for his safety but did believe that his fame as a poet and his upper middle class would protect him no matter what. Nevertheless, on July 13th 1936, just right before taking the train from Madrid to Granada, he gave a friend a manuscript draft of The Public and made him promise to destroy it if something were to happen.
The fascist army of Francisco Franco attacked the democratically elected government of the Spanish Republic on July 17th 1936, which was the beginning of the Spanish War and the subsequent fascist dictatorship that lasted until 1975. With the Francoist army taking his hometown of Granada, Lorca hid in the house of a close friend, who was a member of the conservative party. The Francoist soldiers looked for the poet. They found him, he was arrested. On August 18th 1936, he was assassinated. In the words of one of the killers, for being a faggot.
His body, along those of three other people, was thrown in a creek and has never been found.
Lorca, as every queer I know, knew a lot of things, some of them, things that are not told. Maybe things whispered by ghosts, which is what we called premonitions. Lorca himself wrote in 1930, 6 years before his death, a poem that accurately predicts his assassination:
Cuando se hundieron las formas puras
bajo el cri cri de las margaritas
comprendí que me habían asesinado.
“When the pure forms sank
in the cri-cri of daisies,
I knew they had assassinated me.
They combed the cafes, cemeteries and churches,
they opened the wine-casks and closets,
destroyed three skeletons to take their gold teeth.
But they couldn’t find me.
They did not find me?
No. They did not find me.
But it was known the sixth moon fled above the torrent,
and the sea— suddenly!— remembered
the names of all it had drowned.
The Public manuscripts were lost. Very few knew about this play that overflew with homoeroticism, gender fluidity, feminism and a general rage against the normative system.
In 1975, the dictator Francisco Franco finally died, after been kept artificially alive for months, tubes and machines protruding from his body, his death fully mediatized through photography and television. Images of a dictator eternally dying but never completely dead.
In 1975, The Public manuscript reappeared in Lorca’s friend house, who had kept it locked and hidden for 39 years. The play was performed, not many times, because as Lorca stated it was an impossible play.
Bear with me then, the main influence for this exhibition is indeed a theatre play that I have never seen performed. And it is obviously the queerest of plays by the queerest of Spanish writers.
My exhibition Las cosas que se quedan/The things that remain investigates how to express experiences of haunting on the Spanish Mediterranean coast through drawing. I therefore work with issues of liminal presences and political violence in the context of touristic sites. It includes the ghosts of those assassinated during the Franco dictatorship as well as those who drown daily while attempting the Mediterranean crossing. Though it does not focus on queer experiences, my project is theoretically, methodologically and politically queer and it intends to bring queer reflections to our understanding of history, memory and political action. Queer bodies, and more so, penalized queer bodies in times of fascist dictatorship, become liminal at the beach: they are present but often hidden in spaces where bodies are highly visible. As a Southerner Spanish queer artist, born in the transition between dictatorship and democracy, I am very aware of the presence of those bodies, those stories never told, but to which I owe so much. This exhibition is therefore a brief attempt to explore the queer haunting at the beach, to question the failure of the archives in accounting for these experiences, and to reflect on the potential of queering strategies in art. In short, my work is a tribute and a call for queer action in times of fascism.
In this talk, I have chosen to present you three stories. Keep in mind that there are many more stories to tell and that I may not know them all. Ghost do not like to be described and analyzed, and queer ghosts are even more sensitive to any attempt to theorization. Therefore, instead of explaining my work, I have chosen to tell you three of the many possible stories.
The first one, which I had already started, is that of The Public and how the sand came to be in the show. From here I will move to what I believe to be a crucial notion in our current times: the idea of the life on the right. I will share with you the reflections and embodied actions of Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel and Spanish painter Ocaña who is in fact depicted in the exhibition. I will end with my dear friend Philomena, who some of you met at the opening. She was very kind and came to spend a day with us during her holidays at the beach. Her presence reclaims the space of queer gestures, queer bodies and queer memories as site of resistance against the life on the right.
Story 1: The theatre under the sand
As you have seen, in the show, every drawing emerges from the sand. There is almost 50kg of sand in that room. The sand, is in fact the queerest element of the work.
When The Public reappeared nobody knew what to do with it. It is indeed, an impossible play. There is no lineal narrative; the characters, that Lorca named figures as if they were drawn, change appearances, challenge gender constructions, reject straight romantic love stories, choose their own names; there is also a play within the play, references, subversion of other theatre texts; there are shadows who fall in love and horses that speak; a naked homosexual Christ fully painted in red; a scene in a hospital-train wagon very similar to the ones where the Francoist doctors used to lobotomized homosexuals. And there is sand, a lot of sand.
On the last pages of the draft, the conservative Magician whose specialty is to make seem real the things that are not, angrily yells
“what can you expect from a group of people who inaugurate the theatre under the sand? If you open that door, this theatre would be full of dogs, of mad people, of rain, of montruous leaves, of sewer rats. Who dares to think that all the theatre doors can be broken?”
The figure of Director who also sometimes happens to be Enrique who also happens to be Juliette and sometimes the homoerotic Pampanos and the red Christ answers: “It is only by breaking all the doors that the theatre can be justified, by seeing, through its own eyes, that the law is a wall that can be dissolved in the tiniest drop of blood.”
The theatre under the sand opposes the open air theatre, the one of appearances, fake news, normative stories, dominant cultures, erasure, silencing. It is from under the sand that everyday tragedies, forbidden love, secret desires, unspoken stories, unheard whispers, queerness emerge, to not only make the hidden truth be visible, but to question the hypocrisy of the audience, the public, by in the words of Lorca, “dirtying them with blood”. The public is in fact, as the title of the play signals, the principal agent of this play called life, the ones that substain a society built upon fascist principles.
Furthermore, the director underlines the unbreakable relationship between the theatre under the sand and the ghosts. But not every ghost, the ghosts that as Avery Gordon argues in 1996, emerge from the systemic violence allowed and perpetrated by the audience. This theatre under the sand, which is the theatre of truth, which is the theatre of blood and queerness, emerges from the recognition of this violence, of this haunting and of the need for a call for action.
The Director warns the Magician ““one day, when all the theatres burn, you will find on the couches, behind the mirrors, and inside the golden cups made of cupboard, the gathering of our dead locked there by the audience”.
Story 2: What will you do to us, compañero?
Some people have asked me about the Nazi and Francoist symbols in the exhibition: the crashed plane with a nazi svastika on the wing, the dress of the Feminine Section of the Francoist regime with the Falange symbol embroidered on the chest, the lighter that advertises the National-Catholic slogan of Arriba Espana! Up Spain. What are these objects connected with the history of fascism doing in a show that speaks about the haunting of those killed by the dominant systems? Isn’t haunting about the ghosts of those silenced?
Believe me that as a political artist striving to visibilize what is kept invisible, this was a very challenging question. Ultimately, I chose to draw what I named los fantasmas, the Spanish word for ghosts. I did this because I found many Spanish texts from Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Spain that refer to this other experience of haunting, the one of a system named “democracy” haunted by the fantasma of a fascist dictatorship. In other words, these drawings are a reminder that we live in a live regime built upon the aesthetic principles of the fascinating fascism as Sontag’s would say.
It may not seem important, because it is only aesthetics. But think about it, if one can make public a tattoo of an Indigenous image and cry when acknowledging European settler colonialism, but still sign a document that contributes to the persistent theft and genocide of Indigenous communities, then the politics of moral justice and western democracy are just a PR campaign. That is, you are maybe handsome for a white cis-straight dude, but it is all, as Lorca would say, open air theatre. It is not about you say, but about how well you make us believe the story you are telling. So, it is about form, so it is about aesthetics.
As my close friends know, I am actually obsessed with fascist aesthetics, and I see it everywhere, even on Instagram. Living under fascist aesthetics is not the same as living under fascism. Affirming that we live in a fascist regime is a complex statement that would require many discussions. Instead of using the term fascist aesthetics, I will from now on refer to this systems of practices and beliefs as “life on the right”. Argentinian philosopher Silvia Schwarzböck uses the term “life on the right” to describe current regimes in modern postdictatorial countries like Argentina, Chile and Spain, where a military totalitarian regime gave place to a democratic liberal system. In these countries, contemporary democratic politics are haunted by the fantasmas of the dictatorship, or as Spanish Alicia Vilaros puts it, the social body remains possessed by fascism. It would not be fair to say that Argentina, Chile, Spain live under a fascist regime, however I believe it is accurate to affirm that our current neoliberal system imposes a life on the right on all of us, which in postdictatorial countries is exacerbated by the incarnation of the fantasmas.
The life on the right does not allow for any alternative way of living, it may seem it gives you a choice, but it does not allow for radical structural challenges, as there is no life outside neoliberalism. The life on the right dreams of an existence without dissent, without problems, without disagreements. The life on the right affirms that if you work hard you will achieve your dreams. The life of the right states that it is a-historical, just, morally superior because it is natural. Therefore the life on the right is always heteronormative and always violent against queer people. The life on the right believes in comfort, in saying sorry when you don’t feel sorry. The life on the right answers “this is the way things are”. The life on the right is the life I live because there is currently no other life to live. This is a sad realization, a tough acknowledgement. Which is why I drew the Nazi and Francoist symbols.
So, then, what will you do to us, compañero?”
Any dictatorship aims to kill dissent. The Spanish fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco was built upon the ideology of National-Catholicism. This ideology sets Catholicism at the core of Spanish National Identity. For example, in the Discourse of Spanish Catholicism we can find quite disturbing statements like “Spain [is] Christ’s girlfriend”. By creating this theological national paradigm merging Catholicism and Spain, Franco regime equated any infringement to the Catholic religion as anti-Spanish. Therefore homosexuals were perceived both as sinners and as a danger to the nation. From 1970 that the Francoist regime imposes re-education therapies, lobotomies, electroshock treatments and other forms of tortures for homosexuals and trans people. Homosexuals and Transexuals were also sent to jail, either to two specialized isolated or to regular prisons where they were subjected to routine torture and rapes. Homosexuals and Transexuals in jail were identified as “social prisoners” in opposition to “political” prisoners and “common” prisoners. In 1975, after Franco´s death, an amnesty process was started but no political faction, that includes the socialist party and the communist party, supported the release of “social prisoners”. “Social prisoners”, that is homosexuals and transsexuals, had to wait until 1978 to be freed. They did not get to vote on the first democratic elections after the dictatorship not were they consulted in the referendum for the Spanish Constitution. Until today, “social prisoners”, contrary to “political prisoners”, have not received any compensation not acknowledgement for the repression they suffered. Many of them don’t have a right to pensions because they did not work, as they were in prison. They did not study, because they were in prison, they did not have any job experience because they were in prison, which often put them in a precarious financial situation after the dictatorship. They do not have a right to specialized healthcare after the physical and psychological violence they were subjected to by the state.
In the exhibition, there are drawing of two main queer Spanish activist, Silvia Reyes, and Ocaña. It is to Silvia Reyes that I owe a lot of my knowledge of the repression of that time. Ocaña´s art keeps inspiring my work, and as such there is a drawing of one of his performances in Barcelona.
On May 1st 1977 in Barcelona, queer artist Ocaña took over the stage of a large festival organized by the CNT, the confederation of anarcho-syndicalist labour unions. As often, he was dressed as a rich Andalousian lady, an imagery of femininity cherished by National Catholicism. Along with two other friends, he started singing a pasodoble while getting undressed. The band that was playing loud rock and punk music had to stop. The audience, according to contemporary sources, only had eyes for Ocaña, completely naked and asking for everyone to get rid of the clothes of Francoism. This was only one of the multiple interventions that Ocaña did. All his action aimed to subvert and question not only National-Catholicism pervasive presence after Franco´s death, but also, to challenge the normalized life that left wing parties and gay organizations were working towards. Indeed, Ocaña and his friends were soon made to leave these progressive and LGBT associations, as their political position were too radical. They placed transgender, drag, cross-dressing, sex work and the destruction of the state, gender and sexual identity binaries at the core of their political action. They did not believe in the state and they did not believe in the normalization of homosexuality. They fought for the queerization of the political left.
Very few of these radical queer activist survived. Many died of heroine overdosed, of AIDS. Many others, like Lesbian social prisoners who were ostracized by communist and socialist political prisoners, committed suicide.
In 1986, Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel also entered a meeting of left wing activist groups gathered to protest Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Wearing high heels and a communist symbol as a make up, he took the stage, uninvited. Against the yelling of the audience, he read his long manifesto. This is just an extract:
Injustice stinks
And I suspect this democratic dance1
But don’t speak to me of the proletariat
Because to be poor and queer is worse
One must be tough to withstand it
It is to avoid the machitos2 on the streetcorner
It is a father that hates you
Because his son is a queen
It is to have a mother whose hands are slashed by bleach
Aged from cleaning
Cradling you as if you were ill
Because of bad habits
Because of bad luck
Like the dictatorship
Worse than the dictatorship
Because the dictatorship ends
And democracy comes
And right behind it, socialism
And then what?
What will you do to us, compañero?”
Ocaña died in 1983. He had created a papier-mache costume of the sun. And while performing in his hometown, the costume got on fire. As Lorca, he also had a premonition and had painted his own funeral years before.
Now that we live in the life on the right that Ocaña fought against, I hope that my exhibition echoes Lemebel´s words. It is not only about the ghost, or los fantasmas, or the silence, but on bringing radical queerness to the core of any progressive politics.
Story 3: My dear Philomena.
I have a very good friend. My friend and I met through a common acquaintance. My friend was having a drink with this acquantaince when I entered the bar. She, the acquantaince said, you both need to talk as you are both obsessed with Federico Garcia Lorca.
This was completely true. We sat and we talked about The Public for hours. We talked about the play longer that it takes to perform it. We spoke so much that we decided to perform The Public, which was obviously a mistake, because it is an impossible play.
However, we still decided to create a theatre collective named Pez Luna and perform our own plays where multiple genders meet. Not only genders like feminine and masculine genders, but art genders and literary genders, and space genders. My friend Philomena Flyn-Flawn and myself like to bring what we like together. We like drag shows, we like puppets, we like drawings, we like theatre, we like cabaret, we love Federico Garcia Lorca. So our plays are a cabaret performance mix of hand drawn drag shows with finger and shadow puppets and obviously, Lorca. This mix is itself a queer manifesto, we bring together all these things that may not always belong together. It is like when my partner makes miso banana bread, it sounds strange but it is delicious.
Philomena came to visit for the exhibition opening. Some of you may have met her. She interrupted her holidays to come spend an evening with us at the beach of the exhibition. She was just standing there, sunbathed and magnificent as always, engaging in conversations with the viewers. For example, she asked, did we meet yesterday at the beach?, how are you enjoying the sea?
From what I have been told, she managed to take some of you from the position of the art viewer to that of the beach tourist. Through her questions and conversations she made you realized you were entering another space that the one you were expecting. May it be possible to call this site, then, a drag site? May it be possible to call this exhibition, indeed, a drag exhibition?
I am not bold enough yet to state those things, but I do believe that drag as a subversive narrative that brings to light how we construct stories is very present in my work. Another fundamental element of drag is to take things so seriously that there is no point in being serious about it at all. In other words, the elements of humour and playfulness, the subversion of stealing some minutes of our lives to the production system of neoliberalism just for pleasure.
Pleasure is a radical queer principle.
I constructed this exhibition as I met Philomena. My many walks at the beach resulted in many findings, some of them took me to the archives, a document in the archives took me to a song, a song took me to a story, a story took me to a friend, a friend took me to another finding.
In all this process, I followed my pleasure instinct for stories. I love stories, all of them. The ones I have been told a thousand times as much as the ones that do not have an ending. In this exhibition, I did not plan of a story for you, the viewer, but of a constellation of drawings, of keys that may open the doors to the stories you want to tell.
I built this exhibition, as I work with Philomena in Pez Luna collective, mixing fiction and facts, mixing poetry and life, mixing tears and laughter in a non-linear narrative that echoes the theatre under the sand. This is a very serious and a very un-serious show. I do believe, as Philomena does, that the two things can cohabitate, we can laugh and cry at the same time.
My friend Philomena also brought the queer body at the core of this exhibition. In the drawings there is no bodies, and the only bodies in the show are those of the viewers walking around. With Philomena though, who stated she was vacationing at the beach in the show, something else happened. She belonged in the space, and all of us, maybe myself included, strived to enter that site. The drag queer body of Philomena, her gestures, her words, her interactions, allowed the viewer to enter a site that because of her, was visibly identified as queer.
My friend Philomena stood there, sunbathed and magnificent as always.