Electra. A Life Story Told in a Picture.

Abstract

The Spanish Civil War bursts into Electra's life at the age of four, filling her life with pain and fear along with her family and so many other families who experienced abandonment and the flight from their homes and their land towards an uncertain future. We are situated in Alameda, a town in Malaga, Spain. Alameda is a land of peasants, olive trees and esparto grass, which provide a livelihood for its inhabitants. Electra is forced to be called by a safer name when a new government regime comes to power. Her name is struck off a civil register in an attempt to erase her republican history. This event is the trigger for Electra's desire to tell her autobiography. From this moment on, Electra's daughter begins an investigation as a researcher into the formation of her mother's identity through the events she recalls and narrates. How do her circumstances influence the construction of her basic identity? What can we learn about her from her own account? Is the review and reflection of her life relevant to herself? How does the investigation transform the researcher's life? But we are not only talking about the spoken or written account. The reflection that appears in the photographs found on the events experienced provides us with a social, political, demographic, geographical, historical, ethnographic... context, which at the same time completes a story, a narrative in which we can immerse ourselves in a time and events. A photograph found, when Electra is now ninety-two years old, fills her world with memories that uncover a silenced epiphany, the death of her younger sister as a result of famine and disease in wartime.