As part of the “Spanish Civil War. Art, Conflict and Memory” programme, the National Museum is offering an exercise in historic memory, on the situation of the LGTBI movement during the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, through two round tables that will be recorded at the Barcelona LGTBI Centre as podcasts. You can attend the live recordings or follow them online.
The first round table, “Volume I. Guerrillas”, is being held on Tuesday 28 September, at 6:30 pm. Related pieces from the museum’s collection will be introduced, focusing on the struggle of Republican guerrillas, with the story of Florencio Pla, popularly known as La Pastora or “the intersexual maquis”. This discussion will reflect on the language of struggle and revolution used by contemporary queer action movements.
The second round table “Volume II. Refugis” will be held on Thursday 11th November. On this occasion the discussion will be based on the images of evacuation and refuge present in the Museum’s collection, in order to trace the concept of persecution and exile for reasons of sexual orientation or gender identity, from the Spanish Civil War to the present day.
The podcasts will be presented by Núria Perales, the National Museum’s Head of Communications, and moderated by Víctor Ramírez Tur, an art historian and lecturer at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. In the first podcast there are contribution from Teo Pardo, a transfeminism activist and sexual educator, and Laura Vila, an actress and intersex activist. Taking part in the second session will be Lídia García, an art historian specialising in popular Spanish culture and gender studies, and Rodrigo Araneda, a psychologist and the president of ACATHI (Catalan Association for Integrating Homosexual, Bisexual and Transsexual Immigrants).
The aim of the round tables is to recover the queer voices that have been silenced throughout history, focusing on the period of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. The idea is to form a triangular perspective involving the Museum’s pieces, the LGTBI context of the period and an approach from modern times. At the same time, the sessions bring a disruptive perspective to the National Museum’s collection, making it possible to reflect on current social problems.
To attend the recording of the live podcasts at the Barcelona LGTBI Centre, you must register beforehand on the National Museum’s website. In order to listen to the broadcast live on the Museum’s YouTube channel, you also have to register first. All the registers will be operational soon.
This collaboration coincides with the development of “Memory, absence and presence”, a series of activities in which the LGTBI Centre aims to recover, review and vindicate various aspects of the LGTBI movement’s collective memory.