SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, Spain — “O home na praza e a muller na casa” (“The man in the square and the woman in the home”) is considered one of many misogynistic expressions that had been widespread in Spain throughout the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. It comes from an period when girls’s habits, motion, and morals had been strictly contained and managed within the title of conventional values and patriotism, and displays an insistence on the erasure of girls from public house.
This saying and several other equally sexist ones seem in Mar Caldas’s “Guía postal de Lugo (1936–1976)” (2014/2024), a wall set up by which the phrases hover over black and white photographs of girls working in locations akin to pharmacies, markets, hospitals, and canneries.
This piece opens Mar Caldas: Mujeres, trabajo, y memoria (Mar Caldas: Girls, Work, and Reminiscence) on the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea. It’s an apt introduction to the Galician artist and educator’s layered apply. Because the Nineteen Nineties, Caldas has fused analysis, images, video, and set up to acknowledge and vindicate untold tales of girls’s lives and labor. Curator Monse Cea writes that Francoist refrains like those on this piece “continue to mock us to this day,” however by shining a highlight on the indispensable function of girls’s work inside and outdoors the house in bigger society, Caldas exhibits that ladies have lengthy defied their message.
Set up view of picture portraits of girls in Spain’s Galicia area in Mar Caldas: Mujeres, trabajo, y memoria on the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
The exhibition of latest work begins with Caldas’s images collection Facedoras de Bueu (Makers of Bueu) and Facedoras do Baixo Miño (Makers of the Decrease Miño), each of which depict girls staff across the southern Galicia area of Spain. Her portraits seize farmers, lace makers, seaweed collectors, caretakers, and others within the picturesque inexperienced countryside, outdated city quarters, and seaside villages that make the area such a preferred vacationer vacation spot.
The truth is, Galicia’s native economies and social welfare have been fueled for generations by girls like these, whose labor has additionally traditionally been ignored and under-compensated. In these large-scale, fastidiously constructed photographs, the ladies pose triumphantly in compositions that mimic well-known work by canonical European artists like Velázquez and Goya. In “Esfolladora de millo” (Corn Husker) (2018), an older lady stands at heart of the body clasping ears of corn to her chest, their husks flaring out from her physique like wings. Her critical, regular gaze exhibits us that she refuses to be ignored, and that she is rightfully pleased with her labor. Not fairly documentary photographs, the photographs are nonetheless a considerate celebration of the vibrancy and dignity of those girls.
Set up view of Mar Caldas: Mujeres, trabajo, y memoria on the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
The second half of this transferring present is devoted to Caldas’s undertaking Retrato de familia (“Family Portrait”) (2023–24), commissioned by the museum. Right here, the artist additionally attracts on her circle of relatives’s traumatic historical past — her grandfather, a socialist union chief in Vigo, Spain, was executed by firing squad in 1937 — to discover private and collective experiences of violence and reminiscence.
Mar Caldas, work from the Sementes collection (2024)
Mar Caldas, “Carmen Nogueira Martínez (Mamacarmen)” from the Sementes collection (2024)
Element of archival materials in Mar Caldas’s Retrato de familia (2023–24)
Mar Caldas: Mujeres, trabajo, y memoria continues on the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Rúa Valle Inclán 2, Santiago de Compostela, Spain) by means of Might 25. The exhibition was curated by Monse Cea.
