The new exhibitions of the Universitat de València addresses the Spanish Civil War and Classical Theatre

  • Office of the Vice-Principal for Culture and Society
  • August 30th, 2018
 
Imagen de la exposición 'Habitación. Pedro G. Romero. El Archivo F.X., las chekas psicotécnicas de Laurencic y la función del arte'.
Imagen de la exposición 'Habitación. Pedro G. Romero. El Archivo F.X., las chekas psicotécnicas de Laurencic y la función del arte'.

The different scenarios of the Spanish Civil War and the 15th anniversary of theatre company Komos are the themes of the new exhibitions of the Office of the Vice-Principal for Culture and Sport in September. On the one hand, an exhibition on the exhumation and identification works of the victims of the Spanish Civil War and dictatorship will be held in the Palau de Cerveró of the Universitat de València. On the other hand, there will be two exhibitions in the Cultural Centre La Nau: one of them will address the facilities that were used by means of psychedelia and surrealism to make the prisoners lose their senses during the Spanish Civil War, while the other one focuses on the history of the Komos Group.

13th of September. Palau de Cerveró.  Exhumando el silencio. Memoria, ciencia, identidad​ is an exhibition that has been conceived as a didactic tool that aims to show the technical and scientific tasks at the working areas and the laboratory forensic techniques for the identification of victims of the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorships. The exhibition shows the works that the Grupo Paleolab has carried out. In the last 15 years, they have participated in about 30 projects for the recovery of the historical memory and have exhumed around 200 victims and missing. Most of them have been identified.

20th of September. Cultural Centre La Nau (Acadèmia room). Habitación. Pedro G. Romero. El Archivo F.X., las chekas psicotécnicas de Laurencic y la función del arte recovers the use of surrealism in the Spanish Civil War in order to drive prisoners insane. The chekas were prisons outside the law that were created during the Spanish Civil War in the Republican controlled areas to detain, interrogate and judge suspects of sympathising with Rebel faction that rose up in arms against the Second Republic. Habitación. El Arxivo F.X., las Chekas psicotécnicas de Laurencic y la función del arte is an exhibition that has been possible thanks to Archivo F.X., which works since the end of the 1990s studies the psychotechnical chekas that Alfonso Laurencic built at the Santa Úrsula convent in Valencia and the churches of the streets Vallmajor and Zaragoza in Barcelona between 1937 and 1939. The project examines the disillusion of the psychoactive expansion of perception, the necessary crisis of Utopian vision and the limits of art.

The exhibition is commissioned by Nuria Enguita and Ángel Calvo Ulloa.  The chekas, which are replicated in real size in the room Acadèmia of La Nau, were designed by the Austrian-born French Alfonso Laurencic with the idea of using elements of modern art to exert mental torture.

25th of September. Cultural Centre La Nau (Oberta room). ). 15 años de teatro. Grupo Komos recreates the history of the young Valencian theatre company. Since the first show, over 500 students of the highschools Vicenta Ferrer Escrivà and Districte Marítim of València have been educated through theatre as it played important Greco Latin works such as Medea, The Trojan Women, Oedipus Rex or Antigone, among many others. The company has been honoured several national awards such as the first national prize of the Premios Buero de Teatro Joven in its two modalities and the first prize in the Concurso Nacional de Teatro Grecolatino of the Ministry of Education in its two categories.