2023-09-21 06:50:27
I see a way to live. A way of living that, furthermore, is very much in agreement with me and that has been the way to save me from everything.
When I was little, when I left convent school, I said, mother of God, what a shit world. And thanks to photography I have survived, because if not, maybe not.
Yes, and so much, but I continue to defend myself with the image, which is already a lot.
Es Pilar Aymerich who speaks with this newspaper in front of the black and white photograph of a theater performance, in 1962, at the Teatro Romea. It is a frozen image of the work Esther’s first storyby Salvador Espriu, and on stage Two women who have just become friends and who will later share books, reports and activism face each other: Pilar Aymerich and Montserrat Roig. In that play they were 16 and 17 years old and each had a single phrase: “I said ‘mare, mare, la mulassa!’ And Montserrat answered ‘repiqueu, que sou a corpus!’ I still remember! And when we went to do reports and something happened to us, one time some of the PLO locked us in a basement, we always said, ‘mare, mare, la mulassa!'”
The 2021 National Photography Prize winner tells it with a laugh in the hall of the Circle of Fine Arts (CBA) Madrid that hosts the first major retrospective of his work in an exhibition titled Lived memory, an exhibition curated by Neus MiróIn collaboration with Factory and the Center d’Art Tecla Salawhich brings together more than 150 images that cover his entire career, from the 60s to 2008. Aymerich inaugurates the new CBA exhibition season that he directs Valerio Roccowhich this year will host the work of great names in Spanish photography, including colitis, Gervasio Sanchez y Cristina García Rodero.
First came the theater
A young Aymerich will meet the set designer Fabià Puigserver and the playwright Josep Maria Benet and Jornetwill finish studying and will not want to dedicate himself to the stage because “the professional theater that there was in Catalonia, in those years, was vaudeville, nonsense, and I was used to avant-garde theater.” In 1965 he traveled to London and he stops at the images of the attic in which he lived, and remembers that in those years the songs of the Beatles and the Stones were mixed with the slogans against wars like Vietnam and that one day he will ask his father to send him by mail the camera I used to take photos of her when she was a child. And he will go out with her and then he will go to Paris for a few years and He will return to Barcelona in 1968, where he will meet again with the independent scene and underground, and there are his photos of the work with which he opened his doors on Free Theater or the first Greek Festivalbut also the image of Katya transsexual with whom she will befriend and whom she portrays in the room of the boarding house where she lives, in the same building where that variety venue was at the end of Las Ramblas called Venus Dome. “I was looking for stories,” she says, “in reality, what I have always wanted is to tell stories in images and Katy offered me an unusual story, which took me many years to publish.”
From the beginning, Aymerich will give her photographs a set designer’s look and she will go out into the streets hours before the protests are called and she will study the light and the urban landscape and, when the protesters arrive, she will not “hunt” the photo: “Photographers say that ‘I’m going to hunt for an image.’ Not me, I fish, I go there, I wait and something always comes out.” And in those years after Franco’s death, Aymerich It will be on the avenues and in the university auditoriums, in the strikes, the assemblies and the demonstrations., but you will never notice the headers, the first banner. He will get inside and observe the people and sign images as iconic as that of that young mother who carries her son on her shoulders and from her neck hangs a sign that says ‘jo també sóc adultera’ in a 1976 demonstration in favor of of the decriminalization of adultery.
“I was looking for the girl in the photo for many years to thank her, and I’m finally going to talk to her because I found her recently,” explains Aymerich, who will also portray the confinement of the wives of Motor Ibérica workers, the protests of the construction workers, the Barcelona Stock Exchange full of men already all those women who took to the streets in 1977 to shout against the rape and death of a Sabadell worker named Antonia España, and they will protest alongside the Cine Comedia of Barcelona, which at that time had one of those exposure films on display, “completely degrading to women,” he says, “titled “The sins of a fiery man”.
Aymerich’s camera will record the dawn of the feminist movement in Spain, “from the intellectual women who are trying to shape the feminist movement in a theoretical way, to the working women who are making demands in the factories. This will be the beginning, then the end of the Transition will come and the soufflé will be dismantled. In the demonstrations we always said, ‘but if we are four old women, where are the young women?’”, she explains, “not like now”. She says that the street does not have the same energy today as it did then: “Nowadays it is a street where citizens have lost the habit of demanding”.
How did they welcome her in a world that was then practically occupied by men?
Many times he said good, and it is true. But then, thinking about it, she said, “How good?” I mean, they didn’t remember you sometimes. When a book was made or when photography was talked about in Catalonia, sometimes they would mention you and then they would pass by. It’s delicate. Sometimes we said ‘I’m going to be the vase’ because there always had to be a girl at the round tables.
This keeps happening, Pilar.
This continues to happen, yes, the vase exists for life.
Lived memory It closes with color images of a project shared with the historian Isabel Segura called Travelers to Havana2008, and with a series called Witchesin which Aymerich portrays left-wing militant women belonging to the union world, with a bare torso, to answer the question of “who would be the witches of today, who would be the women who would be burned at the stake today.”
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