Installation

Amigas viejas de las que no sé nada [Old friends I know nothing about] is an interdisciplinary project that is configured between writing and textile and graphic production. This research aims to open doors between the past and the present, mediating between both through critical fabulation, and creating narratives from the archive as a performative axis of communication. In this way, ties are forged between friends separated by ideological oblivion, interweaving their narratives in a mixed archive that forces tolerance to ambiguity.

Based on this methodology, the pieces on display focus on a research into one of these ‘old friends’. In 1933, the magazine Mundo Gráfico published the only portrait of La Asturiana, a transvestite star impersonator about whom little else is known. From the emptiness that surrounds her figure, the artist produced a series of actions as a means to establish communicative links: distributing advertisements, sending letters, creating maps and making a
shawl to imitate the one covering her in the portrait. These actions are poetic ways of reshaping a memory, drawing new routes of access to it, and making it possible to create relationships and genealogies that sustain it.

The project aims to be a vehicle to dignify the memory of the realities of flight that surround the Asturian context, yesterday and today. La Asturiana, a transvestite migrant, is the symbol of the ideological exile, the queer exile, the exile from poverty, roof and gentrification.

Artist: Gonzalo Mon Valdés

Work included in the exhibition: Terranautas