Body, territory and memories in Light Years Away by Edurne Rubio

Abstract

Faced with a notion of territory as a mere space to be mapped and cataloged, Light Years Away (Rubio Barredo, 2016) proposes an imaginary territory that refers to a physical space, the Ojo Guareña caves in Burgos, as a contender for material and symbolic constructions. This piece develops the connection between body, territory and memory from the testimonies of a group of speleologists, who more than forty years after their first explorations, visit the caves together and remember their youthful days, coinciding with the end of the dictatorship in Spain. The analysis points out the aesthetic procedures with which the work is constructed, at the same time that it dialogues with some of the current discussions in the field of history and critical geography. On the one hand, orality stands out as a resource to recover a polyphonic account of history following the contributions of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui; and on the other, from the theoretical framework of Latin American feminist geography, it values ​​the embodied territory and validates the knowledge of lived experience. The study, more generally, points out the capacity of artistic practices to contribute to reflection and the dissemination of knowledge, in dialogue with political issues that contemporary affect us.