País lejano
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Project realized in collaboration with Irene de Andrés
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On May 1, 1937 the Spanish Republican Circle of Montevideo (Uruguay) sent a contingent of 3,000 kg of canned corned beef as aid to the Republican front in the context of the Spanish Civil War. The corned beef is a very economic food product, common in the humble Uruguayan homes (and also in the British ones), but totally unknown at that time for the Spaniards. 85 years later, a group of archaeologists opened a test pit in the old concentration camp of Jadraque, in the province of Guadalajara, finding, among other elements, remains of some of these cans that traveled from Rio Negro to Spain.

With the piece País lejano [Faraway country], Irene de Andrés and Alán Carrasco reconstruct a historical episode that took place in the most turbulent years of the 20th century, connecting Spain and Uruguay through solidarity. The two cans that make up the diptych reconstruct the 5,200 nautical miles that separate both regions and the 85 years that separate our shared history, understanding the very ocean that separates both nations as a non-space that functioned as a barrier and as a connecting element at the same time, reinforcing the ultimate idea behind this work: that of the Atlantic route as a bidirectional path.

Thus, the diptych País lejano poses a temporal ellipsis that, based on minimal archaeological material -usually catalogued as “discarded material” in the archaeological excavations themselves- helps to understand the complexity of the crossroads that the Civil War itself represented: the three steamers of the Société Générale de Transports Maritimes of Marseille (France) that were used to transport the canned meat were the same ones that transported the Uruguayan volunteers who made up the International Brigades, but also the Spanish exile himself who, finally, after the fall of the Republic, was welcomed in America.