AIR#19. "The Black Ball" and poetry in archives

 In conjunction with the celebration of LGBT History Month, we look back at the project “Memory in Motion: Lorca and the Archive”, by Andrew A. Anderson, Melissa Dinverno, and Christopher Maurer, which received the SAA’s Philip M. Hamer and Elizabeth Hamer Kegan Award in 2025. This award is given to projects that go beyond the conventional archival uses to effectively raise public awareness of specific body of archival documents.

The Memory in Motion project took the form of both an exhibition and a book, which explore the life and work of the Spanish writer through documents preserved by the Federico García Lorca Center in his hometown of Granada.

This project stands out as an example of transatlantic collaboration aimed at disseminating an author’s work through their archival collection, bringing to light documentation that was previously little known or entirely unknown, also about the time García Lorca spent at Columbia University in 1929.

In 2024, Dinverno edited a book in Spanish about the project titled "Lorca y el archivo. Diálogos con el Provenir" [“Lorca and the Archive: Dialogues with the Future”]. In it, she states that “by understanding the act of archiving as a form of mediation in itself, this volume advocates for studying, theorizing, and presenting archival collections to the public in a way that reveals their construction, the vicissitudes of their existence, and their tacit narratives—thereby prompting new ways of understanding both Lorca and the archive. At a transitional moment for Lorca studies—coinciding with a renewed interest in archival studies—this book seeks to initiate a conversation about the intersection of the two, drawing on a multidisciplinary perspective that encompasses bibliographic, cultural, museological, literary, and performance studies. By framing the García Lorca archive as a field of study in its own right, this book opens up new avenues for research at a time of particular urgency for these and other archival collections”.

Now, ninety years after his assassination during the Spanish Civil War, García Lorca has returned to the forefront of public attention, thanks to the film “The Black Ball” [“La Bola Negra”]—directed by Spanish filmmakers Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo—which won the award for Best Director at the recent Cannes Film Festival, sharing the honor with Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski for “Fatherland”. “The Black Ball” posits the theory that García Lorca’s final work—which bears the same title—may have been lost amidst the turmoil unleashed by the war. In one scene, the directors present their vision of how a significant portion of the documents the poet and playwright kept in an apartment in Madrid came to disappear.

 

The “Memory in Motion” project offers a way to transcend historical reality and gain a better understanding of the author’s work, thanks to the documentation that has survived to the present day. It is the best way to combat the symbolic erasure perpetrated by the killers of a writer who was killed primarily because of his homosexual orientation. “The Black Ball” was released in theaters in the United States and Canada on October 16th.

You can find more information about “Memory in Motion” project on the Philip M. Hamer and Elizabeth Hamer Kegan Award’s webpage, on the Federico García Lorca Center’s website, and through an article by Devyn Blandford on the website of the Indiana University—one of the initiative’s sponsors.