And Still (Facing North), 2017

Ruedo Iberico, or RI, was a Spanish political printing press and a bookshop situated on rue de Latran, in the Left Bank in Paris. RI was also a weapon against fascism: a group of artists and writers attempting to organize and educate them-selves at a time when ideas were prohibited. RI welcomed exiles from Spain who had fled from Franco’s dictatorship. In the sixties, the artist’s father would sit the bookshop and spend days reading texts on their staircase. The front door faced north. He does not remember much from those days when he lived in Paris; he was there May 1968. He smuggled books from Paris across the border into Spain, along with many others of his generation. Later, in what Breton would call an objective chance encounter, Fernández unknowingly came to live in the same location of Ruedo Iberico. The works in the exhibition are observations of my various returns to this site on rue de Latran, over the years of 2010-2016. The accompanying drawings are an attempt to piece together the narratives of the individuals and of this site, where both history and personal memory reside.