Photographer Laetitia Tura presents the exhibition this Saturday at the Exile Memorial Museum (Mume) in La Jonquera They leave me in exile, focused on the latest witnesses to the Republican exodus. It can be visited until April 10 and is a collection of photographs summarizing the author’s research work on the memory of exile and state violence.
According to Tura, “more than eighty years after the Civil War, the story of the vanquished is still to be restored». “The memories of the Spanish exile take insidious forms, halfway between amnesia and excess of speech, because they are not recorded in the collective memory,” says the author of a work that does not seek “the ‘scientific objectivity, but the restoration of a sensitive way to the ways of production of memory’.
Laetitia Tura, granddaughter of a Republican in exile in France, investigates January and February 1939, during the retreat, when half a thousand Republicans crossed the Pyrenees and ended up in makeshift concentration camps on the coast of Roussillon. and later throughout France. “Exiles become undesirable, banished from the city because of their status as foreigners. Of these old fields, now there is only sand, sea and mud “, explains Laeitita Tura.
The show focuses on three of the characters photographed and interviewed by Tura at his home, all exiled to France after the Civil War: Pedro Peralta, Dolores Tejada and Maria-Olga Rovira.
“Some have gone through their lives with the ghost of a missing person who has never been found,” says the artist, who also investigates and portrays material traces found on beaches and archival work on the files of the boarding schools.