The city of open windows is an art project created during a two-week-long artist residency in Valletta, the capital of Malta.
It is a network of eleven papercut illustrations spread about the city of Valletta, inspired by stories and anecdotes found in the streets, bars, and ports of Valletta as well as in closed monasteries and in the catacombs of old churches.
It is an exploration of a city with a long history and a rich and multifaceted culture, its everyday life, and its microhistorical curiosities, showing the hidden sides of Valletta.
Malta, which is an island made of soft limestone that can easily be carved, is full of underground tunnels, some of which date back to the 16th century, when battles between the Maltese Knights and the Turks would partly take part underground.
Later, many tunnels were dug as shelters during World War II – Malta was the most bombed place in the war – underneath houses, churches and in the ramparts of Valletta.
When you walk through the dripping wet underground tunnels of Saint Augustin‘s church, where people sought refuge during the bombings of WW II, you can still find pencil drawings from 1941 on the walls – clumsy drawings of Hitler, Swastikas and nazi planes, under one of which is written: “Happy christmas with bomb”.
#1 Strait Street / Strada Stretta
During British rule, Strait Street, a very long, narrow, and shady street (it is said that there is never sun in Strait Street) running through the center of Valletta, once was Valletta’s infamous bar district and a meeting place for the many sailors arriving at the ports of Valletta.
After being deserted for many years, bars are opening again in Strait Street.
This illustration is located at the Thirsty Lawer, a bar at the end of Strait Street. It shows a sailor drinking with a barmaid – barmaids were young women who would entertain sailors in the bars and make them drink, while they themselves would receive colored water instead of alcoholic drinks, and a token for every guest for which they would later receive some money, seven lira, which was a comparatively high sum to the five lira an ordinary worker would earn a week. Being a barmaid was, as opposed to prostitution, a well-respected profession and some of them were even married and had children.
This papercut is available as a fine art print here
In the ancestral portrait gallery of Casa Rocca Piccola you can find a beautiful portrait of Monica de Piro d’Amico.
Monica had the summer of her life in 1929, when she went for a vacation in Florence and got herself an Italian boyfriend, who commissioned a portrait of her wearing a strapless dress, which created quite a scandal on her return to conservative Malta.
Her parents were convinced that with that immodest portrait done of her, she wouldn’t find a husband anymore. But she found one – a Canadian officer who must have liked the portrait, but who unfortunately would die early.
Monica never remarried though and at the age of 90, her grandson remembers, she would still rave about the Italian boyfriend.
The story of this illustration takes place in my head. In Valletta, I was living near Old Mint Street and everytime I passed by, I was wondering about the name - it always made me think of mint the plant, which made it kind of surreal. When I did some research, I found out that by mint there was meant a facility that manufactured coins that once was located in this street –and that’s why this illustrations contains both a plant and coins.
From the age of 18, Bert was was working as a distributor of gas cylinders, which was a very hard work given that he had to carry the heavy gas cylinders up and down the stairs of people’s houses. He also had a small take away in one of the neighbourhood houses. One day, there was an accident in this house – one of the gas cylinders leaked and caused an explosion which caused the death of four people. The whole house was destroyed, including Bert’s take away. When he heard the news, he fainted. He had an insurance, but never claimed anything in fear that he would be accused of having caused the explosion intentionally. The case was investigated, and it was proven that it had not been Bert’s fault. After that, Bert opened his take away a few houses up the street, which he still keeps running at age 78.
On one of my first days in Malta, I took the ferry to Sliema, a town of soulless and ugly buildings opposite Valletta. I walked around there for half an hour before I returned, thinking of what a waste of time it had been to go there. But entering the port of Valletta again, I saw a fisherman on the shore, sitting there with his fishing rot and a red cat sitting on a towel he had spread over his lap, and so that image I found gave sense to my seemingly senseless trip. On my last day, I went down to the ferry port to look for the fisherman and to give him a print of his illustration. I asked a man about a “fisherman with a green jacket and a cat on his lap”, and it turned out that it was him – he just had cut his curly hair in the meantime. “It’s me!”, he said and pointed on his green jacket which was hanging in one of the caves which people had dug into the rampart of Valletta to seek shelter from the bombs of the second world war and which now were used by the fishermen to store their utensils. His name was Xavier, and the cat, Horacio, was there too. Xavier, who told me that he would come to fish twice a day, had adopted him when he was born three years ago, he kept a tin of cat food in his little boat and would feed him the small fish he caught.
There is something about cats in Valletta – they not only sit at the feet of the statue of justice in the Barraka Gardens but you also find them in shopping windows of Republic street sleeping to the feet of mannequins.
And then, besides this one, I found another beautiful, but very different story of a friendship between a human of a cat which I will share soon.
The Augustinian sisters living in St. Catherine’s convent never leave it, except when they die and for the other’s sisters funerals. There are only a handful of nuns living here now in a building which appears austere from the outside, but is graceful, airy and flooded with light on the inside, with beautiful white corridors arranged around a courtyard of orange trees – a serene and secret oasis which only very few people are allowed to see.
Here used to live Sister Mary, who used to be the caretaker of the convent. When Sister Mary died two years ago, she was buried outside the convent as it was custom, but after some years her body was returned to the convent’s crypt.
When you enter the lower level of the convent and walk through the the dark arcades around the courtyard, Mini will appear, a tiny, delicate cat of whom it is said that she would never leave Sister Mary’s side. When you continue towards the crypt, Mini will follow you, enter the crypt with you and then jump on the tomb of her beloved Sister Mary: It will take some persuasion to make Mini leave the crypt again.
Galea art store is all about sail ships. Not only is it full of watercolors of ships painted by the first owner of Galea, but also the wood of the facade, which was destroyed during a bombing of Valletta in 1942, was rebuilt from wood of ships sunken in the harbour of Valletta in WW II.
The former shop owner was so obsessed with painting ships that once during an air strike, he went out to the harbor to paint. A policeman found him and dragged him away.
Thirty years later, the policeman came to the shop to ask whether the painter had survived back then. He has, answered his sons, but sadly he died two years ago.
The shop owners are a true fountain of marine stories – one of my favourites was that of a man coming into the shop and looking at a watercolor painting for a long time. When asked whether he was interested in buying it, he told the owner that he had been on that very ship while it was bombed and sunk – he said: “How can I buy this painting! It reminds me of my colleagues jumping off the ship into their death!”
The king’s own band club is a private club house in Valletta run by a philharmonic society called “the king’s own band” which prides itself having been named by King Edward. In a hall upstairs, you find display cabinets of memorabilia and paraphernalia of all kinds, some of the most curious of which are hats (which are actually called zucchetti, meaning “small gourd) sent by cardinals and even one by the pope. Finding a pope’s hat in your post box is an exceptional honor – much more, I was pointed out, than the worn out pope’s shoes that I found in a display cabinet in Casa Rocca Piccola.
Guiseppe Cali was a famous painter who painted many churches in Valletta and other places in Malta. His favourite model was his daughter Margarita, an acclaimed beauty, whose face you can find in many of the saints and angels of Valletta’s churches.
There exists still one photograph depicting her as St. Dominic, and in fact if you look at the the painting of St. Dominic in St. Dominic’s church you can see that it’s her.
As a reference to that religious context Margarita is depicted with a flaming heart – while the heart with the arrow to her other side stands for her unhappy marriage.
Her husband was obsessed with his beautiful wife to the point that he “didn’t want to share her with anybody”, which meant he kept her from having a social life.
Once he bought her a beautiful dress in Paris which she was going to wear for a night at the Opera, which she very much loved (although she and the jealous husband used to spend the show in a private loge and left early so to minimize social interaction).
But when her husband saw her in that dress, he found her too beautiful to go to the Opera – and refused to take her. Margarita died early, and much later her husband would give the following advice to his grandson: “Never be jealous with your wife – it will ruin your marriage.”
The splendid cathedral of St. John’s is Vallettas biggest and most beautiful cathedral. Its vast floor is covered with the tombs of the Maltese knights, fine works of stone inlay featuring latin inscriptions decorated with skulls, skeletons, hour glasses and other symbols of transience.
One knight, whose tomb is located on a site entrance, and who knew that the grandmaster would take that side entrance and would have to walk over his grave, had himself made the following inscription: You who walk over me every day, pray for me, because soon you will be lying next to me.
You can buy SAVARI here.
SAVARI is a collection of drawings from my sketchbook from five months of Iran & India.
It‘s a travelogue full of drawings, sketches, poems and notes, capturing my day-to-day adventures in a strange world, telling stories about operated noses in Iran, baking cakes in Shiraz, harvesting pomegranates in Iranian villages, encounters with strangers in fairytale-like mosques and drinking whiskey in the Indian jungle.
Half imaginary, half real, it‘s a many-layered documentation of a personal story in the form of a journey. At the same time, it tells about the political circumstances and the cultural environment in which the journey takes place, always oscillating between reality and fantasy.
The story behind SAVARI:
In October 2014, I traveled through Iran for one month with the mission to fill up my sketchbook with impressions and stories that would capture the spirit of a mysterious and magical country.
I wanted to seek inspiration in its fascinating culture that goes back thousands of years, and at the same time explore a country that nowadays is regarded with much controversy and prejudice.
It turned out to be the most ambivalent journey I had ever taken: As a woman who was traveling alone, I experienced many difficulties and even threatening situations.
But soon, I found myself in a fascinating world full of architecture and art so stunningly beautiful that I could not take my eyes off of it;
What I found in Iran seemed different from everything else I had seen before: It was a world full of beauty, art and poetry, where old persian poets are still worshipped, and where people actually enjoy reciting poetry on every occasion.
A world full of magic and inspiration, full of mystery and beauty, inhabited by the most hospitable and refined people I had ever met. It was something I could not have imagined actually existed before. It was a world that profoundly touched me.
There was inspiration everywhere. I sketched in tea houses, in rose gardens, in mosques, in courtyards, on bazaars, sitting on the kitchen floors of new friends.
And while the story of my journey evolved in my sketchbook, I was fascinated with how much interest my book aroused amongst the people I met there, how they carefully leafed through it, how thoroughly they studied every single page, and how thoughtfully they commented on it, and the enthusiasm with which they told other people about it, and how delighted they were when they finally became part of the book themselves.
It was kind of a singular experience. My book became everybody’s book. It went through so many hands, connected me with so many people, and this is one of the most beautiful memories I have about Iran. This is why it makes sense for me to make art.
I continued to sketch about my journey when I moved on to India, finding plenty of new inspiration between the jungle and the sea.
My treasure: To feel before I know
To live by the sea and swim somewhere else
To have seen the great palaces
and not died of beauty
Lake City is a more than 3 meters long ink drawing that was created during a two month long artist residency in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India, during spring 2017.
The book is available here.
Udaipur, also called Lake City and known as the “Venice of the East”, is considered one of the most beautiful cities of India. It is so beautiful that many Bollywood stars choose to have their wedding there.
Udaipur is a fairytale city full of gorgeous palaces, a labyrinth of lakes and bridges, and millions of intricate alleyways leading to mysterious temples.
Lake City was created while exploring the city and directly drawn in the streets of Udaipur during many, many hours. It is a multispatial tour through the city and documents things seen, experienced, memorized, and fantasized about in a surreal city.
The drawn panorama of the city begins with a (drawing) self-portrait in an arcade of Ganghaur Ghat and then meanders around the magical lakescapes of Pichola Lake and Fateh Sagar Lake with its fantastic palaces, temples, and gardens as well as the winding alleys of the old town with its many shrines, tiny tea stalls, and open fires.
The drawing might seem to depict an imaginary place, but it contains just as many real as fantastic elements – it blurs the line between imagination and reality and thus reproduces the feeling one gets while strolling through Udaipur.
The drawing Lake City is an attempt to capture the overwhelming surreality and beauty of a city with its people, gods, and animals. Palaces swimming on lakes, goddesses showing their tongues, women floating on the water riding on swans, and horses disguised as baby elephants – all these are images found in Udaipur and become part of a fantastic portrait of the spirit of the city.
LAKE CITY has been featured in the Guardian’s Illustrated Cities Series and you can read all the stories of the book here!
Nobody’s Song
Like the bird,
I want to sing songs of the earth
Like the cicada,
I want to sing of timelessness
and the sinking sun that
might never come again
Like the Bougainville blossom
I want to kiss the sky
with an open mouth
Like the rice
I want to know how to be full
and to be ready
I am a human: I am none of these
I am confined to my papers
onto which occasionally
some rain drops and some
insects crawl.
Wind, blow away my papers
I am tired and I want to
go out into the fields.
This is my sketchbook from a journey to West Sumatra, the country of the Minangkabau, a matrilineal* and matrilocal society where women traditionally used to have an important role. At the same time, they are devoted Muslims, which means they are combining matriarchal and patriarchal elements in their way of life.
In the traditional way of life, which is now slowly disappearing, women would live together in houses, while the sons of the family would spend the night in the mosque from a very young age, and the husbands of the daughters would only stay with them at night.
Minangkabau means “victorious buffalo”, as legend has it that in a fight with the Javanese, they defeated their buffalo with a baby buffalo who had sharpened horns.
The importance of the buffalo is reflected in the traditional houses of the Minangkabau whose roofs are shaped like buffalo horns, and in the traditional horn-like headgear of women.
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*the family name and possessions are passed on from mother to daughter
**after marriage, the couple lives at the woman’s family home
This project was supported by the BKA / Federal Chancellery Austria and the Austrian Embassy in Jakarta.
A cottage of wind
at times full of thunder
at times full of birdsong
A cottage of wind is an artist book created during an artist residency in August 2019 in Castagno di Pitecchio, a tiny village of 80 inhabitants situated in the Tuscan hills. It’s a collection of poems, drawings, and text miniatures, inspired by impressions of the village and tales and memories by its inhabitants, for example memories of bombings during the Second World War and encounters with soldiers, contrasted with seemingly random anecdotes of the village life.
There is the saying that every village is a world of its own, and it’s so true.
What on the first day was nothing to me but a random settlement of stone houses, in two weeks turned into a universe of its own, full of meaning, complex and complete with all its little wonders and equally beautiful banalities.
Every day another door opened, both literally and metaphorically, and led path to something (or someone) new and beautiful, and in the end I found myself feeling that I had become part of the village, and the village part of me, filling all my senses with its fragrant forests and kitchens, with the cool water from the old fountains running through my hands, with the soundscape of Via Castagno, a street that belongs to the children and the cats, the flavours from the vineyard and the olive groves served by new friends, cool shades of old stone arcades and forest paths giving shelter from the white Tuscan sun, and the walks through the pitch-black forest at night, all accompanied by the cricket’s song that knows no beginning and no end…
In addition to the book, I made some ink drawings inspired by stories found in the village and wild flowers found in the forest.
I also made a wallpainting of Greta and her friend Emma, and that was how I met her:
For some days I had been playing with the idea of making a wall painting, but althought I had collected so many interesting stories, none of them really caught me for a wall painting.
But then one day I was having lunch at Benedetta’s garden, when all of a sudden I heard a strange sound – it sounded like a very weird bird.
What is this? I asked curiously.
Oh, this is just Greta, answered Benedettas husband and laughed. Greta and her trompetta. You might have seen her, she’s the little girl with the hoola hoop. And, he added, she can even do the hoola hoop and play the trumpet at the same time!
An image popped up in my head, and I knew that I had found my theme for the wall painting.
And so I went out, grabbed my drawing stuff and went to meet Greta.
Greta's mother invited me to do the painting on the facade of her house, which was perfect. And I'm glad to have found – amongst all these stories about castles, bombings and trains – such a happy and lively image from the future for this dreamy little village that has been living in the past for so long.
Black and white photos by Rachele Salvioli.
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MEGHALAYA is a book inspired by myths, traditions, and everyday stories I collected and recorded during a month living amongst the Khasi tribe in the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya, a remote area in Northeast India.
The Khasi of Meghalaya in Northeast India is a matrilineal tribe, which means that women own all property and pass their surnames to their children, while husbands move to the wife's household after marriage.
The Kadduh, the youngest daughter of the family, will inherit all property, take care of her parents and continue the family line.
This, together with their vivid cultural heritage of myths and traditions makes the Khasi Hills a dreamy and magical place where time seems to have stopped but which, at the same time, is the home of a society that is surprisingly modern and equal.
The Meghalaya sketchbook, documenting one month of living in the Khasi Hills, is full of fascinating stories from Khasi culture – age-old myths of snake goddesses and other mythical creatures, funny jungle stories. It tells about the witnessing of complicated animist sacrificial rituals, wandering through sacred forests, listening to life stories in gloomy teahouses, everyday absurdities of India – and how it is to live in a country where women rule.
Buy the book here
Meghalaya ist ein Buch mit Geschichten und Zeichnungen, das während meines Aufenthalts beim Stamm der Khasi in Meghalaya in Nordostindien im November 2018 entstanden ist.
Die dschungelbedeckten Khasi-hügel (vormals Teil von Assam) sind eine entlegene, schwer erreichbare und für Touristen eingeschränkt zugängliche Gegend in Nordostindien, in der ich im November 2018 einen Monat im Rahmen der Artist Point Residency in Mawkyrwat lang Geschichten und Eindrücke der dort lebenden Khasi sammelte und aufzeichnete.
Die Besonderheit der Khasi-Kultur ist ihr matrilineares System – Besitz und Familiennamen werden über die jüngste Tochter vererbt – eine einzigartige, traditionsbewusste Gesellschaft, in der einerseits die Zeit stehengeblieben zu sein scheint, die aber gleichzeitig in ihrer Egalität erstaunlich zeitgemäß anmutet.
Die in Meghalaya entstandenen Zeichnungen geben Einblicke in eine weitgehend unbekannte Kultur, die von der Globalisierung und der patriarchalischen Mehrheitskultur bedroht wird.
Die Zeichnungen sind Annäherungen und Interpretationen von Eindrücken und Geschichten, die im Gespräch mit den Khasi entstanden sind.
Das Buch dokumentiert uralte Mythen und Märchen von Schlangengöttinnen und anderer Fabelwesen, in Alltagsgeschichten und Dschungelanekdoten verpacktes Kulturgut, die blutigen Rituale der Naturreligion der Khasi, Hexerei und Ahnenverehrung, Kochrezepte, verzauberte Geisterwälder, Biografien und Anekdoten unterschiedlichster Menschen – und nicht zuletzt zeichnet das Buch ein Bild davon, wie es ist, in einem Land zu leben, in dem die Frauen regieren.
Ein spannender, persönlicher und poetischer Reisebericht, der seltene Einblicke in ein ganz besonderes und märchenhaftes Land gibt, dessen einzigartige Kultur im Untergang begriffen ist.
Buch kaufen
Fillas de la Riba is a network of monochrome wallpaintings on old wooden doors spread about the old town and surrounding streets in Riba Roja d’Ebre, a small rural village in Catalonia, Spain. It’s a playful reflection on Riba-Roja’s past, inspired by old photographs of Riba residents in traditional clothes, ancient juniper production, the river Ebre and stories from the remarkable life of Teresa Aguilà Garcia, an illustrious resident of Riba-Roja.
Riba de Ginebre | Juniper River
This door is inspired by the juniper ovens. Some years ago a group around Josep Aguilà, following the reports of very old people, rediscovered seventeen juniper ovens around the village, dome shaped stone-ovens where people used to make juniper oil.
Filla de la Riba
Filla de la Riba, daughter of the River, gave name to the art project I was working on here at Riu'd Art Residency in Riba-roja d‘Ebre, Catalonia.
She was inspired by old photographs of village residents from the beginning of the last century.
La Sirena | Stories from the River
The village of Riba-roja d’Ebre is situated in a loop of the river Ebre, and before there were trains, people used boats to transport goods.
The first story I heard about the river was from a man named Paquito who told me that once there was a man who shipwrecked, couldn’t not swim and saved himself by holding onto a ram’s tail.
Josep Aguilà in turn told me that until the 1920, hundreds of ships would pass the village every day. Some villages next to the river even charged tolls. Downwards the ships would swim with the stream, and upwards with sails or with the help of horses or mules who would pull the ship with a rope from the shore, helped by men with oars inside the boats.
In these days, as there was no running water, women had to go to wash at the river, amongst them Teresa Aguilà. Ships would pass by, and the boat men on the ships would give them compliments, some more elegant than others.
Sometimes words with double senses were exchanged between the boat men and the laundresses. The men would ask them about the state of wetness, pretending to mean the river but meaning something else, and the women would ask whether it was hard and long, pretending to mean the oar but actually meaning something else…
Roses for Rosita
During my stay at Riba-roja d'Ebre, of course I soon had noticed and admired the hundreds of beautiful pot plants that were placed in every corner of the village. Riba-roja is, like many spanish villages, in a severe state of decay that is less romantic than saddening. Especially the beautiful old town of Riba-roja was really desolate, with crumbled walls and ruins where once beautiful houses had been.
The pot plants, lush and green, were decorativley placed in door cases, walls and along the narrow streets and conveyed the comforting feeling that old Riba-roja had not yet been left to its fate. It showed that there still existed some love and care for this old place. It seemed a bit like fairy magic.
There was definitely a good spirit at work, and on the last day before the presentation of the artworks I got to meet the good spirit. She entered the bar where we would have lunch and gifted us with some of her handmade tote bags, just like that. I had never seen her before.
Her name was Rosita, and she told me that after her husband had died she had gone to the mayor and suggested him that if he would pay for it she would decorate the village with pot plants and take care of them. And so she did.
And so I painted some pot plants for Rosita.
Teresa and the wolf
This door painting is about Teresa Aguilà, grandmother of Josep Aguilà, who told me many stories about her during my stay at Riba-roja d’Ebre.
This is the story of Teresa and the wolf as told by Josep.
Teresa Aguilà was born in Riba-roja d’Ebre in the year 1895 and she lived to be 105.
When she was seven, both of her parents died within a week and she went to stay with an aunt who was very poor. So little Teresa, at the age of seven, had to begin to work as an employee in the house of rich people. She worked throughout her childhood and youth, for which she did not even get any payment, only food. She washed clothes, cleaned houses, worked on the field and in the kitchen. Of course, she did not have time to school. But when she was fourteen, she decided to pay a tutor to visit her for an hour every night and teach her how to read, to write and basic mathematics. Teresa read the newspaper every day up to the age of 103, even picked it up herself, at the age of 104 she still looked at the photos and the headlines.
And here comes the incredible story of Teresa and the wolf: When Teresa was 12 or 13, she worked at a finca, a farm three hours away from the village. Every week she had to go and get food for the workers from the village, alone, only accompanied by two mules. She was woken up at 3 in the night, and at 4 her journey began. One night, on her way from the farm to the village, she noticed that there were wolves behind her, coming closer and closer. Terribly scared, she thought how she could save herself. Finally, she took a long rope, tied one end to the saddle and let the other end fall to the ground, and moving the rope she stirred up dust, which frightended the wolves, and they dissappeared.
When she would arrive in the village, the people who prepared the food would force her to attend mass. They would not give her anything to eat, neither before nor after mass. To check whether she actually had attended mass, they used to ask her which priest was holding the mass and what the color of his robe was.
But Teresa, who was as starving as smart, would go to the church, check out the priest and his robe and then go straight back to the house, where she sneaked into the hen house and stole two or three freshly laid eggs, which she ate raw. On the way back, when she was out of sight of the village, she stopped the mules and took a bit of bread and sausage and finally had something proper to eat.
More stories about Teresa:
Teresa and the hunger
When Teresa Aguilà was 17 years old, one of the extra works she did was something called “espigolar”.
Around her village there were many olive fincas, and “espigolar” meant to go to the owner after the harvest was done and ask for permission to pick the last few overlooked olives.
It meant looking for olives on the fields after there were practically none left, there were so little olives left that it was not worth the work, almost absurd to do it, and only very poor people would do it.
At night, after a hard day of work, Teresa and her friend Rosita, would go to “espigolar” to a finca where they had gotten permission to do so. After two or three days of work they collected a ridiculously little amount of olives.
But then they realized that on the way to the finca there were some fincas where the olives had not been harvested yet, and every day when they would pass by they would pick two, three kilos from those trees without permission, which was much more than they could ever had picked doing “espigolar”.
They sold these stolen olives and then Teresa said to her friend: What do you think of buying a tupi (a ceramic pot) with the money? So every day we could buy some beans or chickpeas and prepare some nice food.
This is, in the words of Josep Aguilà, who told me this story, the spirit of survival. Had they been caught, they would have been physically punished or would have ended up in prison.
This gives you an idea of the bitter poverty Teresa suffered from. But it was even worse. After I told the story to the other artists of the residency, the organizers of the residency told me that when they told Josep about some found some strange looking rodent they had found on their olive farm, Josep would say: My grandmother used to eat that!
Teresa and the dictator
This is the last and the certainly the most haunting story of the life of Teresa Aguilà.
As you already know, Teresa had to fight many wolves in her life, but the biggest one was Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator, and the regime he embodied.
Here is the story as it was told to me by Josep Aguilà, the grandson of Teresa.
Teresa, who was called Tereseta by her friends, or even Teresó (a male sounding version of her name), lived in a time where women faced even more discrimination than today. 90 years ago in Spain, women were mostly locked up in their houses and were not really able to connect with people or surroundings outside their families.
As you already know, Teresa was very poor and could not go to University, but she was very aware and critical of the power the rich people and the ways they abused poor people, especially women. Women not only earnt less than men, often they did not get any money for work at all and were frequently sexually abused.
Teresa herself had to work with an army captain in Reus, the next bigger city, as a maid and taking care of the child you see in the picture. She also had to work in different villages helping in the olive and hazelnut harvest, and sometimes she visited her brother in Barcelona working with him in the coal mines in Figol near the Pyrenees.
So she would often get out of her village, and she would adquire her knowledge not at the university but on her trips.
This also added to the fact that Teresa was more open-minded than the other women in her village. She also liked to talk with men about everything around the work on the fields, she knew all the works perfectly well, the seedtimes, the influences of the moon, and she knew everything about plants and trees – in short, she knew things that the average woman did not know, who would only help on the fields but would not be interested in her work further.
Teresa also loved talking about politics with men during reunions that took place mostly between 1930-36 and of which many were secret, because these reunions were prohibited.
She was lucky to have a husband who trusted her and did not harass her for meeting other men at these reunions. After the reunions, Teresa would go and explain everything to the women of the village, visiting each of them individually in their own house.
Many people would later tell Josep that Teresa was ahead her time. She had a very open mind, was feminist and leftist, without being extreme.
On the 14th of april, 1933, a clock was put in the clocktower of the church from the Republic (the Republicans was the democratically elected spanish government that later would be overturned by the later dictator Francisco Franco by a coup d’etat), and Teresa and a group of other women participated in the celebration. There is even a photograph Josep showed me from that day with Teresa carrying a republican flag.
The Spanish civil war (or rather the Spanish “uncivil” war, as Josep calls it) ended in 1939. Many Republicans were imprisoned and executed, and many others fled either to other countries or places inside of Spain where nobody would know them to avoid persecution from the Franquistas. Teresa moved to Barcelona with her husband and daughter, where she would work in a farm house of a Franquist owner who did not care about their political views.
Then, in 1940 Teresa decided to visit her village for some days, against all advice of family and friends who had come together at a family reunion to discuss the matter.
On the way to Riba-roja with her daughter, she met some people from her village who warned her to go to the village and told her to return immediately, because it was too dangerous.
But Teresa told them that she had no reason to be afraid because she did not collaborated in the death of anybody, on the contrary, she had even defended saved a Franquists from execution and therefor certainly nobody would harm her.
The man she had saved had been a widower with two daugthers and the Republians were planing to execute him and Teresa, who had been an orphan herself, convinced them that it was a great injustice to
turn these two little girls into orphans. Thanks to Teresa, the man was set free.
On the second day in her village, she was arrested, following a triple denunciation. Three “brave” men seized her at her house, beat her up and kicked her, threw stones at her, spat at her and shaved her head. It was so horrible that the memory of the incident makes Joseps mother-in-law with her 96 years still trembling with terror.
They put her in the local prison (a building which still exists today and still looks like a prison, but is not used anymore) held a propaganda trial and accused her of “helping the rebellion”, ignoring the fact that the rebell had been Franco, and Teresa had never carried a weapon or harmed anybody. She was sentenced to 15 years of prison just because she had carried the Republican flag in 1933 and because she had been heard speaking about politics.
Of these 15 years she spent four and a half years in prison in Barcelona, in a prison that once had been a convent and which now is a shopping center. What happened to Teresa happened to thousands of Republican women – 40.000 women went through that prison and now only a small plaquette (two millimeters of memory for each of them, says Josep) reminds of these women who’s only crime it was to be Republican.
Inside the prison, Teresa secretly made herself a ring from some silver coins her daughter, who walked many days to see her in prison, brought her, engraved with the initials of her husband, J.A. for Josep Alabart (which now happen to be the initials of Josep Aguilà) and herself, T.A. for Teresa Aguilà.
In the prison, they tried to brainwash them, telling them that they were demons, that the civil war had been their fault, and that they were useless and unwanted by everybody outside and that the world continued better without them. Many were raped by men as well as by women, which the prisoners were pressured to tolerate without resistance in order to get some benefits like more food or more free time.
Thanks to her ingeniuity, Teresa managed to push herself through prison. But when she came out of prison, she was a different woman. Four and a half years of prison had changed this woman who had been so alive, so happy, so talkative, so intelligent. The woman who returned from prison was scared and dumb and almost speechless, although judging from the photos I saw of her at old age she seemed to have gotten her old self back after time. What had happened during these four years of prison that a person like Teresa would come out of it so scared?
When Teresa’s husband learnt that they had imprisoned his wife, he did not understand, repeating “this is not possible, she was such a good woman, she didn’t harm anybody…” He was so shocked about the unbelievable and went crazy over the loss that he had to stay at a psychiatry for some months. When he was well again, he went back to work on the farm near Barcelona.
Teresa and her daughter, Josep’s mother, would later educate him “badly”, as Franquist, in order to protect him (the Franco regime would continue until 1977). But then again, they educated him well enough that he began to see how things were by himself, and then they talked openly and in detail to him about everything.
I met Josep Aguilà on my first three days of Riu’d Art artist residency, a lively, quick-witted and warm-hearted man overflowing with knowledge and a contagious enthusiasm for many issues. This remarkable man owning so much brain, heart and wit in retrospective gives me an idea of how the personality of his grandmother Teresa might have been.
During the daytime he, together with the organizors of the residency, would lead us around the hills surrounding the village, the dam, the hermitage and one of the juniper ovens he had discovered, answered all of our questions and generously sharing his abundant knowledge with us.
During the night, he invited us artists to his “Bar Josep”, which would consist of a huge table dragged out on the street in front of his house, where he would serve us delicious craft beer and cheese and good, fun conversation.
When I told him that I wanted to hear all the stories of the village, he told me the story of his grandmother and the wolf. Then he had to travel back to Barcelona, but during my whole stay in the village he kept emailing me stories of his grandmother and stories from the village.
Yesterday he wrote me a mail where he explained the story of Teresa and the civil war, which he had told me before, in more detail. So now I can share it with you.
Thank you Josep for sharing these deeply moving stories of Teresa with me and for giving first context and then sense to my artistic stay and work in Riba-roja, where I tried to create some humble memorial for Teresa, knowing that tens of thousands of door paintings would not be enough to adequately remind of and honor Teresa and the other brave Republican Catalan women who were attacked, wounded and killed fighting the horrible beasts of Franco. Hopefully one day these women will get the memorial they deserve.
The IRCC is an artist collective founded in India by artists Elina Kawachi, Deveshi Sahgal, Devika Swarup, Samia Singh, Bianca Tschaikner, Kalpana Subramanian, Iria do Castelo and A&Y.
Watch the documentary by A&Y about the Intercontinental Rollercoaster Club‘s adventures in India.
