Museo Carmen Thyssen

Paquita (Voices of Memory)

During our search for audiovisual images on the past, when looking through www.archive.org we found the documentary Spanish Children, a short educational film made by William Deneen for British Enciclopedy Films. The film sets out to show the lifestyle and character of the people of Álora, a village in the province of Malaga.

The film, made in 1964, is characterised by its clichéd attitudes towards Álora and by extension towards Andalusian villages in general. One of the characters in the film, the young Paquita, is shown on a donkey as if this were her normal way of getting around Álora, whereas in fact she only got on the animal for the filming one of the more folkloric scenes in the documentary.

Voices of Memory is an action-research project that has used different audiovisual formats to create a participative video installation. The project has set out to establish relationships between the past and present, taking the Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga as the focus point for the construction of a potential collective memory.