La Nau Cultural Centre of the Universitat de València inaugurates on Thursday 18, at 7:00 pm, the exhibition ‘Rosa, niño y abeto. Some notes around homosexuality in the Spain of the 20s and 30s that takes as starting point an extended visual essay that the artist Jesús Martínez Oliva (Murcia, 1969) has been elaborating since 2018, in which some visual notes have been taken around the experience and representation of homosexuality in the Spain of the 20s and the 30s of the 20th century in the shape of Lorca as guiding thread. The exhibition, curated by Juan Vicente Aliaga, professor at the Faculty of Belles Arts from the Universitat Politècnica de València, is conceived in the Estudi General Hall, and makes visible through four installations, some of the tackled problematics in this essay.
The sample immerses us in a past time, in some dark years in which freedom to love whoever you wanted was a fantasy, most times followed by violent and disdainful behaviours towards those who contravened the marriage order and the imposition of a society divided in two only genders (man/woman).
Through a group of pictures and archive texts coming from journals and books from the first part of the 20th century, of objects and period materials, along with some recently created sculptures, the artist puts us in front of the mirror where the history of Spain is projected, away from the hegemonic stories focused in the heterosexual rules. This meeting in the archive with the historical violence of our not so distant past, that encourages the project, takes special meaning in the present, threatening another round of past mistakes.
The exhibition marks a journey through the four sections that articulate it. In the first, titled La infelicidad’, pretends to tackle how disgrace and suffering were ideas set to a medical, legal and cultural level as something inherent to the homosexual subject, ideas that have special weight in childhood and adolescence.
The second carries per title‘Olor a clínica’ and it gets inside the pathologisation process of homosexuality through the implantation of medical and psychiatric theories obsessed with classifying each individual in rigid categories at the same time they criticised the vagueness of gender in front of a rocky and unmoving masculinity and femininity.
In the third, Maricas de las ciudades’, it begins with a verse from the poem ‘Oda a Walt Whitman’, by Federico García Lorca. The Granadino poet, who had to hide his lovers and passions, but for his friend circle, also reproduced the existing stereotypes about homosexuality falling that way in an internalised homophobia.
Finally, the last section, ‘El cielo tiene playas donde evitar la vida’, includes a series of pieces inspired in verses by writers such as Luis Cernuda, Vicente Aleixandre, Emilio Prados or the own Lorca, all of them homosexuals. Through the sculptures it is expressed the vitality and the desire that comes with force despite of the oppressive moral dominating during that period.
This exhibition, that will be able to be visited until 9 November, is part of the programme ‘El valor de la diversitat: art, restitució i memòria’ organised by the Universitat de València, through the Office of the Vice-Principal for Culture and Society, in collaboration with the Office of the Vice-Principal for Equality, Diversity and Inclusive Policies and the Valencian Provincial Council (Democratic memory).
A programme of free guided visits has been prepared. All reservations will be done through this link and soon a catalogue about the exhibition will be published.
