Points of Departure: Five Walks, 2015

Points of Departure: Five Walks encompasses a series of walks, an archive, objects, and paintings. Fernández’s project began in 2012 with an initial walk over the mountain range of the Pyrenees, from Spain into France, following Jose Garcia Cinca in the footsteps of the thousands of Spanish Republicans that crossed the same border during the mass exodus after the Spanish Civil War called La Retirada (1939). In an attempt to retrace personal histories through the process of reading the landscape, Fernández began to rewrite and reconstruct narrative from this point of entry, as she experienced both this metaphorical and historical boundary line. Taking Pierre Nora’s idea of the historian as “vehicle of transmission,” Fernández attempts to weave together a dynamic account of history that re-presents the sites and the persons that passed through them. Through this process of re-performing a path in history, Fernández began to build not only her story but also Jose’s, which is bound to the stories of the many others who walked.