This has been a very lengthy project where I learnt so much about skills and concepts to create artist books. The main challenge has been how to present and illustrate notions of identity born out of our family’s experiences and to portray the memory of those loved ones that are no longer with us.

Early 1939, my grandparents with their 4 years old daughter, my mother, left their native Spain to escape General Franco’s regime. Within a few months nearly half a million Spaniards fled this civil war and crossed the border to France. This massive exodus is known as “La Retirada” where many ended up in France in refugee camps and amongst them was, Angel, my granddad.

In 2023, I found his wallet and inside was a document that allowed my granddad to leave his refugee camp to start working as an electrician. Amongst the items in this wallet, I also found a photo of me, aged 6, and a drawing of a house I had made for him when I was 8.

This was the starting point of the project called: La maleta, the suitcase. The title is inspired by my grandmother’s comments many years ago about their life as refugees when she had to keep a suitcase ready to go for a period of five years.

My gran had been trained as a tailor in Spain and made a living sewing and making clothes once in France. She was also the one who kept the family together with her sewing stitches, her enormous strength, and her gentle love.

La maleta has been a journey for me, a journey into bringing back loved ones’ experiences of survival, brutality, racism, sense of self and freedom. 

Being born in a family with on one side a French father, kicked out of his own family for being with a refugee, and on the other a Catalan family, has taught me so much about freedom, physical, but also psychological. I like to call it a free mindset, a kind of outlook in life that tells you to go and see beyond your immediate boundaries and surroundings.

I am myself a foreigner and have been for more than 40 years – obviously in much more peaceful circumstances and with more opportunities – but the present rise of very polarised politics has made me questioned why humans fall repeatedly for the same destructive narratives that led to so much devastation and wars.