For her project at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paloma Polo is committed to an investigation into the history of political struggles shaping the Parisian Northern periphery. Aubervilliers sheltered thousands of Spanish political exiles since the civil war and throughout Francoism. Far from engaging in a nostalgic detour, she pursues personal narrations and social configurations in light of the present reality of Aubervilliers, the city of France that hosts the highest percentage of migrants.
The sustenance requested will serve to conduct principal research, fieldwork and social investigations or interlocutions and will enable the methodological and operational procedure required for the adequate and successful completion and presentation of the project introduced above. The unprecedented nature of Polo’s inquest requires intensive surveys and unusual explorations. She will have to elucidate how to think about a dimension of our political history that has not been thought nor discussed beyond minor groups which are inaccessible at present and remain cut off from the sanctioned past.
Aubervilliers, Saint Denis and the Parisian Banlieue Rouge at large sheltered thousands of Spanish political exiles since the civil war and throughout Francoism. Hundreds of them lived a ghostly existence, many with counterfeited identifications and some completely clandestine, as they strived in the shadows for the organisation of a movement in Spain to democratically assail a brutally repressive and violent system. The Spanish “economic” migrants of the so-called “Petite Espagne” of Saint Denis and Aubervilliers were also progressively organized.
This underground movement, orchestrated from the periphery of Paris by the Spanish Communist Party, barely left material traces but, most importantly, is scarcely traceable in a national history that has been written by way of a systematic erasure of the exploits that paved the way for what, unfortunately, shifted to a delusive “democratic aperture” in the aftermath of the dictatorship.
Polo is plunging into a dormant memory that has primarily survived through oral transmission and has been sustained by militants that have almost entirely passed away. It is not arbitrary that there is no comprehensive critical recollection, compilation or repository of this decisive historical dimension. Only very few autobiographies attest to these episodes.
Paloma Polo’s proposition is to devise and stage a narrative, a script, pertaining to the emergence of matter for thought in the people, in humane forms of socialization that are on the fringe, bearing the disdain of past recollections, but nonetheless shrouding our being in the world nowadays. The investigative stage, which will encompass a myriad of materials, ideas and conversations, is to constitute the core and the basis for her subsequent artistic gestures and outputs.
Together with her research partner, the art historian and theorist Oscar Fernandez, Polo will conduct archival research, an investigation into personal collections and materials and, most importantly, an interlocution with a series of individuals that are to become central to this project. These interlocutions occur by way of affinities that forge personal relations.
This activity will consolidate in a ”Research Centre” that will centralise, compile, order, coordinate and digitalise the scarce and scatter information on the subject (personal files and archives, histories and photographs, interviews and conversations, books, documents from different archives and other images, films, footage or projects that have been developed, etc). Polo will create a particular and distinct display and method to make these narrations intelligible and available for public consultation and for it to acquire broad visibility and outreach. She will work in partnership with other political, cultural, educational and research institutions. This “Research Centre” (tentative title) will have long-term progress and continuity and will ultimately hosted and regularly updated in a website specifically created for it. An itinerant platform of such “Research Centre” will be created to facilitate its presentation during the two solo exhibitions Polo will have in 2018 : at Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo- CA2M and at the Contemporary art museum – MARCO in Vigo, and other subsequent presentations.
The sustenance requested will serve to conduct principal research, fieldwork and social investigations or interlocutions and will enable the methodological and operational procedure required for the adequate and successful completion and presentation of the project introduced above. The unprecedented nature of Polo’s inquest requires intensive surveys and unusual explorations. She will have to elucidate how to think about a dimension of our political history that has not been thought nor discussed beyond minor groups which are inaccessible at present and remain cut off from the sanctioned past.
Aubervilliers, Saint Denis and the Parisian Banlieue Rouge at large sheltered thousands of Spanish political exiles since the civil war and throughout Francoism. Hundreds of them lived a ghostly existence, many with counterfeited identifications and some completely clandestine, as they strived in the shadows for the organisation of a movement in Spain to democratically assail a brutally repressive and violent system. The Spanish “economic” migrants of the so-called “Petite Espagne” of Saint Denis and Aubervilliers were also progressively organized.
This underground movement, orchestrated from the periphery of Paris by the Spanish Communist Party, barely left material traces but, most importantly, is scarcely traceable in a national history that has been written by way of a systematic erasure of the exploits that paved the way for what, unfortunately, shifted to a delusive “democratic aperture” in the aftermath of the dictatorship.
Polo is plunging into a dormant memory that has primarily survived through oral transmission and has been sustained by militants that have almost entirely passed away. It is not arbitrary that there is no comprehensive critical recollection, compilation or repository of this decisive historical dimension. Only very few autobiographies attest to these episodes.
Paloma Polo’s proposition is to devise and stage a narrative, a script, pertaining to the emergence of matter for thought in the people, in humane forms of socialization that are on the fringe, bearing the disdain of past recollections, but nonetheless shrouding our being in the world nowadays. The investigative stage, which will encompass a myriad of materials, ideas and conversations, is to constitute the core and the basis for her subsequent artistic gestures and outputs.
Together with her research partner, the art historian and theorist Oscar Fernandez, Polo will conduct archival research, an investigation into personal collections and materials and, most importantly, an interlocution with a series of individuals that are to become central to this project. These interlocutions occur by way of affinities that forge personal relations.
This activity will consolidate in a ”Research Centre” that will centralise, compile, order, coordinate and digitalise the scarce and scatter information on the subject (personal files and archives, histories and photographs, interviews and conversations, books, documents from different archives and other images, films, footage or projects that have been developed, etc). Polo will create a particular and distinct display and method to make these narrations intelligible and available for public consultation and for it to acquire broad visibility and outreach. She will work in partnership with other political, cultural, educational and research institutions. This “Research Centre” (tentative title) will have long-term progress and continuity and will ultimately hosted and regularly updated in a website specifically created for it. An itinerant platform of such “Research Centre” will be created to facilitate its presentation during the two solo exhibitions Polo will have in 2018 : at Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo- CA2M and at the Contemporary art museum – MARCO in Vigo, and other subsequent presentations.