Álvaro Perdices: Los fantasmas en las formas

Federico García Lorca finished writing Así que pasen cinco años (When Five Years Pass) on 18 August 1931, exactly five years before his murder. Pura Maortua, co-founder of the Lyceum Club Femenino and La Cívica, was his closest collaborator. Together, they founded the Anfistora theatre company and rehearsed the play in the tower room of the Carrión building, now known as the Capitol building on Gran Vía. Designed by architect Luis Feduchi, the building was conceived as an example of modernity. Its avant-garde furniture and carpets would eventually be discarded and dispersed years later. In 1936, Lorca and Maortua resumed rehearsals with non-professional actors, exploring new ways of developing characters through the body and movement. Following Lorca’s murder, the project was interrupted, and the play was not publicly staged in Spain until 1978. Perdices does not reconstruct this episode; he makes it reappear. Images, objects and documents from different periods unfold as layers of time that converge in an almost spectral manner, revealing how modernity gradually dissolves until it disappears from collective memory. The project takes shape through three interventions: a re-staging of the rehearsals of Así que pasen cinco años through new bodies and gestures, presented as a six-channel video installation conceived as an essay on the rehearsal itself; a video work filmed in a room at the present-day Vincci Capitol hotel, occupying the same space in the former Carrión building where Anfistora rehearsed; and, finally, the production of a carpet based on photographs of Luis Feduchi’s original designs. None of these interventions seeks to restore the original objects or experiences, but rather to explore what can emerge from their traces. The exhibition also includes a number of related materials, such as a portrait of Lorca by Joaquín Torres García, made in 1944; Maortua’s biography, written by her daughter Matilde Ucelay, Spain’s first female architect; and original scripts from those rehearsals. These documents place the project within a specific historical context and offer an insight into the figure of Pura Maortua, whose work as the driving force behind Anfistora and as Lorca’s collaborator is essential to understanding the renewal of theatre in the 1930s. Los Fantasmas en las formas is conceived as a prelude to an ambitious exhibition at the Fundación Federico García Lorca, due to open in Granada in September 2027 to mark the centenary of the Generation of ’27. The exhibition at The Ryder introduces Pura Maortua, a creative figure who remains relatively little known, and anticipates the approach Perdices will take to this universe.