LORCA AND THE ARCHIVE

Lorca y el archivo emerges as a powerful tribute marking the 90th anniversary of Federico García Lorca’s assassination, revisiting his life, voice, and enduring legacy through documents, memory, and performance. The show interweaves archival materials with poetic interpretation, bringing Lorca’s spirit into the present while reflecting on themes of repression, creativity, and cultural identity. More than a commemoration, it invites audiences to rediscover the poet’s relevance today, honoring not only his tragic death in 1936 but also the timeless vitality of his words.

This event consists of two lectures: one on la Generación del 27 and the importance of La Residencia de Estudiantes de Madrid for Spanish culture, and the second one on the exhibition Lorca and the Archive: Memory in Motion, curated by Andrew A. Anderson, Melissa Dinverno and Christopher Maurer.

Lectures by Dr. Melissa Dinverno —Associate Professor of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Indiana University Bloomington and curator of the exhibition Lorca and The Archive, on show at La Residencia de Estudiantes de Madrid, and Dr. Stephen Roberts— Professor from the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies, Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies - Nottingham University.

¨"The Residencia de Estudiantes and the Generation of 1927"

Lecture by Stephen Roberts

This talk will provide an overview of an educational institution and a literary movement that have become symbols of the cultural splendour of pre-Civil War Spain.

The Residencia de Estudiantes, founded in 1910, was an experimental educational space where university students lived and studied alongside their lecturers and enjoyed talks by invited speakers such as Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Stravinsky, Keynes and Le Corbusier. It also brought together budding artists such as Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca and was one of the iconic spaces associated with the incubation of what became known as the poetic Generation of 1927.

This Generation, whose centenary we are soon to mark, owes its name to the commemoration in December 1927 of the 300th anniversary of the death of Golden Age poet Luis de Góngora, whose densely metaphorical verse offered young poets such as Alberti, Cernuda, Guillén, Bergamín, Altolaguirre, Alonso and Lorca a means of breaking free from the Romantic and Symbolist idiom of their elders and of their own youthful verse. But the Generation of 1927 was not just about poetry or about this group of male poets. It also involved women poets such as Concha Méndez and Ernestina de Champourcín and a whole host of painters, musicians, composers, dancers, actors, directors, puppeteers, set designers and philosophers who often worked alongside and collaborated with Lorca and his poet friends. The talk will pay homage to this strikingly creative and vibrant generation of artists.

Storytelling Archives: García Lorca and 'Memory in Motion'

Lecture by Melissa Dinverno

Lorca and the Archive: Memory in Motion is a major museum exhibit that is currently in Madrid (April 24-July 26, 2026) at the renowned Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, Spain, where Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) once lived and studied. Curated by Lorca scholars Andrew A. Anderson (University of Virginia), Melissa Dinverno (Indiana University) and Christopher Maurer (Boston University), it tells for the first time the story of the construction of the Lorca Foundation archive since its inception in 1936, using its own materials to activate and sew together stories of salvage, discovery, acquisition, loss, and perseverance. Through over 350 pieces, of which approximately 70% of which are unpublished or rarely seen, it tells the human stories behind the archive's making, revealing the complicated political and cultural contexts that people navigated through war, exile and transitional democracy. This talk gives us a glimpse into this major exhibit, the stories behind it, and some of its signature pieces, bringing the audience closer to the insights it offers and to the way it impacts our understanding of Lorca.

Lorca and the Archive: Memory in Motion

A writer's archive is a storehouse of history and possibilities. It is the fertile soil from which verse, prose, and a constantly evolving vision of their work spring forth, as well as the material trace of that work and the life journey of the writer, his family, and his friends. The Archive of the Fundación Federico García Lorca is the most complex and diverse of the many dedicated to the poet, located in Spain and abroad. Although it has been meticulously catalogued, to date no one has studied its history, its rich present, and the gaps left by war, exile, and state intervention.

Lorca and the Archive: Memory in Motion begins the process of recovering this hitherto unknown history: the evolution of the archive from the poet's death to the present day. As "memory in motion", the exhibition —like the archive itself— highlights the efforts of those who created it and the sociopolitical contexts in which it was produced. It recounts for the first time the various stages it went through: a story of loss and salvation, discovery and perseverance. Based on new and rigorous research in personal, family, and state archives, it looks both to the past and to new possibilities in the future.

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Stephen Roberts is Professor in Modern Spanish Literature and Intellectual History at the University of Nottingham. He has published on Spanish thought (Unamuno, Ortega), the finisecular novel (Galdós, Baroja, Valle-Inclán), poetry (Juan Ramón Jiménez, Lorca, Neruda), Spanish exiles in Great Britain, and cinema (Bardem, Erice). He is the author of Deep Song. The Life and Work of Federico García Lorca (Reaktion Press, 2020). He is currently researching the foreign policy of the Miguel Primo de Rivera Dictatorship (1923-1930) and is leading an international British Academy/Leverhulme project entitled The Limits of Liberalism: Lessons from Spain.

Melissa Dinverno is a professor of Spanish Literature at Indiana University (U.S.A.). She has published Lorca y el archivo: Diálogos con el porvenir (2024) and essays on Spanish literature and film, García Lorca, cultural memory and editorial theory. She is editor of the critical reconstruction of García Lorca’s Suites (in preparation), curator of Suites and the Voyage of Perception (2020 Centro Federico García Lorca, Granada) and, with Andrew A. Anderson and Christopher Maurer, co-curator of Lorca and the Archive: Memory in Motion (2024-25 Centro Federico García Lorca, Granada; 2026 Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid). She is the recipient of an NEH Fellowship, was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the Universidad Complutense and is director of a digital humanities project mapping Lorca-related archives.

Event organised in collaboration with La Residencia de Estudiantes de Madrid.

Event in English.

More information

Residencia de Estudiantes

Centro Federico García Lorca - Granada

back soon - Fundación FGL