A room of one's own

[Editorial coordination: Publications of the Student Residence // Design and layout: Montse Lago // Text: Andrés Soria Olmedo // Edition: Friends of the Student Residence ]

Virginia Woolf's famous quote, "to write novels, a woman must have money and a room of her own", fits like a glove to the experience of Federico García Lorca in the Residencia de Estudiantes. During his life-long stay from 1919 to 1936, he went from occupant of the student rooms to lecturer in the "refined hall," where he said he had heard "about a thousand lectures."

This exhibition (of manuscripts, prints, photographs, drawings, plastic work and objects that come almost entirely from the archives of the Federico García Lorca Foundation, the Student Residence and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía) is divided into four parts:

I. A presentation of general approach to the characteristics of the Student Residence, with informative brochures, the pennant, the head of the blond athlete who inspired the design of his emblem and Impressions and landscapes, the book that the young Federico took written from Granada.

II. A first section already based on the chronology as a resident of Federico García Lorca. It goes from 1919 to 1925, and shows the need and defense of one's own room in very expressive letters of the failure of El maleficio de la mariposa (1920), and, once conquered the permanence since 1923, the interaction with other rooms and with the city, through the Order of Toledo invented by Buñuel, of the contacts with the avant-garde and music (with Dalí,  with Alberti, with Gustavo Durán), as well as the production of poems and drawings. In short, it tries to reflect the formation of those young artists and intellectuals, "love, friendship or fencing" that united or distanced them.

III. The stretch from 1926 to 1928, marked by the appearance of the magazine Residencia in 1926. It reflects the moment in which the formative effort of the previous years was multiplying its fruits in several planes, degrees and levels, from the poetic games, such as the anaglyphs and the putrefactos (some made Pepín beautiful, and of course Dalí, of whom the oils that Federico had in his room are also exposed),  until the successive triumphs of the exhibition of drawings in the galleries Dalmau of Barcelona, Mariana Pineda, Songs and, above all, the Romancero gitano. This part closes with the program of the conference on the children's lullabies that Lorca gave at the Residence, accompanied by the piano, on December 13, 1928.

IV. Finally, the period from 1929 to 1936, which attends to a series of interventions in the Residence, already from outside, among which the rehearsals and the preparation of the university theater La Barraca, formed with students of Letters and Architecture (the characteristic blue jumpsuit of the male components of the group, many of them residents, is exposed) as well as different memories that accompany the Lorca memory of that institution until 1936, when he evokes the book on the language of flowers that José Moreno Villa showed him and its importance to compose Doña Rosita la soltera.

Andres Soria Olmedo
Curator of the exhibition