Exhibitions
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On Exodus and Wind: Spanish exile in North Africa
From October 23, 2024 until March 25, 2025Mondays through Sundays, from 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.
MADRID
Casa Árabe exhibition halls (at Calle Alcalá, 62).
Mondays through Sundays, from 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.
Free entry until the event’s capacity is reached.
In Spanish.
Starting on October 23, you can visit this exhibition in Madrid. It is
an initiative by Casa Árabe and Spain’s Ministry of Territorial Policy
and Democratic Memory, conceived by José Miguel Santacreu Soler as the
scientific curator and Juan Valbuena as its visual curator.
The exhibition will remain open to the public from October 23, 2024 through March 23, 2025 and will provide a historical and emotional journey about Spanish exiles in North Africa.
Their exile reaches the size of a sea. And not just any sea, but ours, the Mediterranean. It is an exile in four movements actually: fear, indignation, hope and resignation.
It is estimated that some 13,000 Spaniards had made it to North Africa by March 1939, at the end of the Civil War. They left the last airfields and ports of the Spanish Republic in airplanes and ships of various sizes. Later, another 4,000 people would be deported to Algeria from concentration camps in France.
However, in 1945 it is estimated that only about 8,000 people remained in the Maghreb region after half of those who had arrived in Tunisia returned to Spain, while others enlisted with the Allied forces, some were taken to the USSR, others were shipped off to the Americas, and still more died in the concentration camps. By the end of the independence processes in the region in 1962, it is estimated that only 2,000 exiles remained in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, and their number decreased in a slow trickle of returns and deaths.
They say that the shortest line between two people is a well-told story. The objective of the project “On Exodus and Wind” is to increase awareness about the experiences of thousands of people who had to leave Spain at the end of the Spanish Civil War and found refuge on the other side of the sea in North Africa (in the former territories of colonial France, today Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco).
The exhibition has received the support of José Miguel Santacreu Soler (University of Alicante) as its scientific curator and Juan Valbuena as visual curator, with the backing of an advisory committee made up of specialists Bernabé López García, Daniel Moñino Reyes, Eliane Ortega Bernabeu and Rafael Sebastiá Alcaraz.
The exhibition, an initiative of Casa Árabe and Spain’s Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, gives us the opportunity to recover historical memory, and to deepen and spread knowledge about one of the most unknown groups of exiles, that of the Spanish Republicans in the Maghreb.
Their exile reaches the size of a sea. And not just any sea, but ours, the Mediterranean. It is an exile in four movements actually: fear, indignation, hope and resignation.
It is estimated that some 13,000 Spaniards had made it to North Africa by March 1939, at the end of the Civil War. They left the last airfields and ports of the Spanish Republic in airplanes and ships of various sizes. Later, another 4,000 people would be deported to Algeria from concentration camps in France.
However, in 1945 it is estimated that only about 8,000 people remained in the Maghreb region after half of those who had arrived in Tunisia returned to Spain, while others enlisted with the Allied forces, some were taken to the USSR, others were shipped off to the Americas, and still more died in the concentration camps. By the end of the independence processes in the region in 1962, it is estimated that only 2,000 exiles remained in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, and their number decreased in a slow trickle of returns and deaths.
They say that the shortest line between two people is a well-told story. The objective of the project “On Exodus and Wind” is to increase awareness about the experiences of thousands of people who had to leave Spain at the end of the Spanish Civil War and found refuge on the other side of the sea in North Africa (in the former territories of colonial France, today Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco).
The exhibition has received the support of José Miguel Santacreu Soler (University of Alicante) as its scientific curator and Juan Valbuena as visual curator, with the backing of an advisory committee made up of specialists Bernabé López García, Daniel Moñino Reyes, Eliane Ortega Bernabeu and Rafael Sebastiá Alcaraz.
The exhibition, an initiative of Casa Árabe and Spain’s Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, gives us the opportunity to recover historical memory, and to deepen and spread knowledge about one of the most unknown groups of exiles, that of the Spanish Republicans in the Maghreb.
