Piedras en la huida. Febrero de 1937

La Desbandá is a harrowing reminder of the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the devastating consequences it had for innocent civilians caught in the midst of the conflict. It is a call for reflection on the importance of peace, compassion, and respect for human rights. It also reminds us of the importance of preserving and transmitting historical memory in order to prevent the mistakes of the past from being repeated in the future.

Among the many images that have reached us from that terrible episode, there is one in particular that stands out: a photograph showing a child in the foreground holding a sugarcane stalk in his hand, looking back. It is a photograph taken by Hazen Size, one of the companions of Norman Bethune, who was responsible for most of the photographs of La Desbandá in February 1937. He accompanied the convoy of civilians who undertook the deadly road from Málaga to Almería in a terrible flight for their lives. The vast sugarcane fields that once covered the Mediterranean coast at that time were what allowed thousands of people to survive, people who had nothing to eat. These fields, stretching from Torre del Mar to Adra, and passing through Motril—once a green and fertile area—became spaces of refuge from the relentless bombs falling from the sky and sea, creating a massacre without precedent.

The installation Piedras en la huida (“Stones in the Flight”) recounts this tragic story of escape and survival. Through two opposing photographs, we observe in one image a group of people consuming sugarcane in a desperate attempt to survive. The sugarcane is their only sustenance, the only thing keeping them alive and nourished. The other photograph speaks of the sugarcane fields themselves, devastated by the passage of this fleeing population—fields where people stumbled across these fragments of subsistence. It is an image that strikes our conscience while transporting us back to that space of conflict—what was once a place of refuge, a place of survival.

That very scene, seen through our own eyes, is present in the video that accompanies the two photographs. We relive the cruel scene of fear and uncertainty, the image bringing us closer to the real space of February 1937, in a desperate attempt to find an escape, to hide, or to survive among the sugarcane fields. Attentively, we listen to the stories of those who were there and who, in fact, survived. They recount their stories of life and death—scenes of hardship, moments of joy hidden behind those canes that were, at times, like stones—obstacles on a tortuous path, but also, in many cases, a means to freedom.