Lecture: Brigitte Vasallo – Txarnega, the (im)possible memory of a non-place

In English

Between 1950 and 1970, six million people in the Spanish state were expelled from their place of residence by the biopolitical mechanisms of the Francoist dictatorship. The place of origin of this diaspora, its locus, does not have geographical continuity, but rather ontological continuity, and this process meant the disappearance of the pre-capitalist and pre-agricultural peasant countryside, as well as forms of life that had been persecuted in Europe since the 16th century and that, with us, they come to an end. The descendants of what Pasolini called “the anthropological mutation” have assimilated as their own the history of monumental places, those that I will call “yes-places.” Reclaiming one’s own genealogy from the earth under one’s nails, from the worlds outside the world, also requires contesting the truth criteria of possible memory and constructing a mutant legacy of being otherness. 

Brigitte Vassallo is a writer, playwright, and performer, Mercè Rodoreda Chair of Catalan Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY), lecturer for the Master in Gender and Communication at UAB, and founder of the 1st Txarnega Culture Festival in Barcelona. Without a university education, she is the daughter of farmers from Chandrexa de Queixa who were exiled from their land and emigrated. Her work revolves around the mechanisms of constructing otherness, with a particular interest in sexual difference and the disappearance of peasant epistemologies.