Rhiannon Clarke: (Un)natural landscapes, feral archive: Lorca’s legacy, on and off the page
Wednesday | June 18, 2025 | 12:15-1:00
Goethe and Schiller Archive, Jenaer Straße 1, 99423 Weimar
Abstract:
My paper considers the relationship between 20th-century Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, his nature-writing, his image in Spanish culture, his archive, and landscape. Material and affective environments informed Lorca’s creative process and his relationship with the “natural world” which he elegized in his writings. His mythologization in Spanish culture has fed calls for ecological preservation in a desire for mimesis between Lorca’s poetic landscapes and their real-life Andalusian counterparts. But this is within the context of a country that was geoengineered by Franco during a lengthy dictatorship: terrain moved for mass graves and monuments, millions of non-native trees planted, rivers dammed and valleys flooded. The un-naturalness of these landscapes mirrors the problematics of Lorca’s archive, an untidy or feral network that was censored, expunged, lost, and dispersed by the ravages of the Spanish Civil War, a history smoothed over by the printed page.