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| Baltasar |
Between 2015 and 2017, Luis Areñas visited towns and
villages all over Spain trying to find answers to the questions raised by his
wish to pay tribute to his grandfather Luis––and all the grandfathers––who died
in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). He would have liked to have known him,
and he knows that his mother and uncle
would have wanted, needed, to live and grow up with him. It was not to be.
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| Mariano |
Where are the survivors? Who are they? What did the war mean to them? Urged on by these questions, he was able to locate some of the last soldiers who took part in the war, and women who experienced life at the time.
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| Vicente Colin |
The portraits presented in his exhibition are of those people, who are very old today, or who have died since being photographed, who were one day the youth of Spain. Most were barely out of their childhood when they went to war, aged 17 and 18 years.
This exhibition does not deal with the objective work of an
historian, but the subjective memory of those who suffered the effects of the
civil war first hand. Luis Areñas wanted to rescue those combatants from
oblivion, give them a name and a face, and listen to their account, an oral
testimony of a historic event that had collective repercussions and of a vital
moment of great personal significance: the unavoidable approach of the end of
their lives.
Baltasar
The testimonies of these fighters have been captured on a 46 min video presenting a number of extracts, fragments of the conversations held with them in front of the camera. Luis Areñas wanted each individual to tell their own story at their own pace. A memory altered by time, by emotion, and by their present circumstances.
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| Bonifacio |
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| José-Moreno |
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