Originally published in The Voice of San Francisco in June 2025
The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts presents Viaje a la luna (A trip to the moon), an exhibition inspired by the only screenplay ever written by the renowned Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. Curated by Diego Villalobos of the Wattis Institute and curator/CCA alumni Rodrigo Oritz Monasterio, the exhibition will be on view from June 12 through October 11, 2025 before traveling to Centro Federico Garcia Lorca in Granada beginning on October 30.
The Life of a Poet
Federico Garcia Lorca was one of the most influential Spanish poets of the 20th century. As a poet and playwright he was part of the artistic vanguard, and was instrumental in pushing Surrealism to the foreground thereby bringing the avant-garde to the people through his art. Lorca grew up in Andalusia, on the outskirts of Granada, a region with a rich history and presence of Gypsy, Roma, and Arabic communities. He worked during a time when Fascism was on the rise and, as an artist who was both gay and leftist, he used his work as an opportunity to tell stories that drew on vivid metaphors and imagery to express his identity and give voice to marginalized communities.
During the late 1920’s Lorca moved to New York and interacted with the Harlem Renaissance where he met influential writers like Nella Larssen and Langston Hughes –who would eventually translate some of Lorca’s works into English. He also met Mexican painter and filmmaker Emilio Amero, who became a close friend and confidante.
In a single feverish night Lorca drafted his first and only screenplay, and convinced Amero to turn it into a film. The filming began in Mexico in 1932. Lorca’s script was a surrealist vision divided into 72 loosely connected short scenes that were mystical, romantic, and violent. The film communicated themes of societal repression and persecution, told through a series of characters who don’t feel comfortable in their own skin. The film never came to fruition because of the poet’s untimely death. Lorca was such a powerful presence in his native country that Franco’s Nationalist army assassinated him during the early days of the Spanish Civil War. Lorca was shot and placed in a mass grave and, despite efforts to find his remains, he is often cited as “still among the missing.”
A Screenplay Reinterpreted
After his death, Lorca’s film production halted and the reel was eventually lost in a fire in Mexico City. It faded into obscurity as another unfinished project. The only remnants of the screenplay are the script itself and a handful of photographs taken during production. Haunting drawings by Lorca, created while he was in New York, will be included along with photograms by Amaro done in New York around the same time. The vision for Viaje a la luna returns to life with this ephemera along with a number of contemporary artists reconstructing the forgotten story and reflecting on thematic throughlines of the screenplay that continue to resonate today. The artists included are: Emilio Amero, Diane Arbus, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Nina Canell, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Ajit Chauhan, Tania Perez Cordova, Federico Garcia Lorca, Rosalind Nashashibi, Francesco Pedraglio, Alvaro Urbano, and Danh Vo.
Alvaro Urbano presents a sculptural work commissioned for the exhibition that recreates a silhouette of Lorca’s balcony in Granada and meditates on his execution. Text work from Danh Vo made for a festival in Seville, based on a line of Lorca’s poetry, commemorates the poet’s execution and the death of a bullfighter. Rosalind Nashashibi’s meditative film work takes as its departure point thematic throughlines of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Shobies’ Story, which has echoes of Lorca’s film including her own exploration of a non-nuclear family structures and communal forms of living. A sculptural work by Nina Canell poetically considers the impact of technology on everyday lives – a question relevant to Lorca who worked as Fascism rose to the fore and technology became a tool for warfare.
The exhibit is a negotiation between the past and the present. An unfinished film, incomplete because of violence, speaks to our contemporary political climate that saw its incompleteness and adorned it with new visions. In Viaje a la luna, the Spanish Civil War, the Great Depression and the rise of Fascism in the West speaks to our own time marked by extreme political polarization, censorship and rampant social inequalities. Viaje a la luna in its incompleteness as a permanently unresolved project creates space to dream of a different outcome to struggles we still face today.