The possible life of things. Exile, historical imagination and other forms of possession

Abstract

There are moments of caesura, of exception, that break the existing link between people and their things and between said things and their representations. As a consequence, the former life of things falters and objects are forced to live other lives: things that could never have existed appear, others are repurposed and, simultaneously coexist phantom with alternative lives of departed belongings. In these moments of dis/order the relationship between people and objects have to b reestablished, even with lost, missing or longed-for items. And I endeavor to do so from a perspective influenced by a pandemia that makes us especially sensitive to affective

relationships with objects.

Now, I look back into a past marked by another sauvage shattering in the life of things: I am referring to the Spanish Civil War and, especially, the early years of the exile’s lives. A time marked by dispossession, a key aspect not well addressed in studies of Franco’s era, but without which it is not possible to fully understand the beginnings of its regime. Moving between eras, with the help of the memories of men and women distant from their belongings, lets me think about new possibilities and ways of ownership that, I maintain, may emerge from their absence. But at the same time, questioning the memory mechanisms and meeting spaces between theory and everyday life.