An Experimental Memorial for Frrederico Garzia Lorca

Neither the bull nor the fig tree know you, nor your horses, nor the ants under your floor. Neither the child nor the evening know you, because you have died forever.

The spine of rock does not know you, nor the black satin where you are ruined, Your mute remembrance does not know you, because you have died forever.

Autumn will come with its snails, grapes in mist, and clustered mountains, but no one will want to gaze in your eyes, because you have died forever.

Because you have died forever, like all the dead of the Earth, like all the dead forgotten in a pile of lifeless curs.

No one knows you. No. But I sing of you. I sing for others your profile and grace. The famed ripeness of your understanding. Your appetite for death, pleasure in its savour. The sadness your valiant gaiety contained.

Not for a long time, if ever, will there be born, an Andalusian so brilliant, so rich in adventure. I sing his elegance in words that moan, and remember a sad breeze through the olive-trees.
-Federico Garcia Lorca

An Experimental Memorialat HINTERLAND 2009
An Experimental Memorialat HINTERLAND 2009

SHOW OCTOBER/NOVEMBER


An Experimental Memorial for Frrederico Garzia Lorca

A mixed media installations
by the Cake and Eat it Collective



Coinciding with the Exhumation of the Poet Garcia Lorca’s Grave, the Cake and Eat Collective memorialized him with a gift. Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain's most beloved poet was shot on August 19, 1936 back against a wall, his body thrown in a pit with thousands of others. He was murdered, at the age of 38, by the fascists because of his identification as queer and because he was an anarchist sympathizer. On the week of October 30, 2009, after 70 years, Lorca’s grave will be exhumed and the remains examined as a first step in addressing the atrocities that happened under the Falangist regime.

The memorial by was an attempt to use gift economy to explore the way we interact with the past and how we collectively process and heal. The installation is a take on the free store, a concept popular during the Spanish Civil War, where clothes are donated by the community and gifted back into the community without any direct exchange. In the context of this memorial, the clothes that are given away become talismans that carry the memory of Lorca on our bodies and act as a lens by which we are able to create a collective memory of him and his works.

The Cake and Eat It Collective creates installations, happenings, performances and visual works that deal with the intersection of social practice art, fashion, anarchism and queer identities and is responsible for the Free Boutique and Louis Vuitton Night, among other things. Please visit cakeandeatit.org or freeboutique.org for more information.

Visitors were welcome to bring clothes or related gifts to add to the installation/memorial and were encouraged to take a gift from the installation as well. This act of exchange was a symbolic statement and will help us to process losses, past traumas or simply celebrate and remember great souls whose spirit we inherited.

An Experimental Memorial at HINTERLAND 2009
An Experimental Memorial at HINTERLAND 2009