The crossing of the Ebro

Conversation between Teresa Lanceta, Nuria Enguita and Laura Vallés Vílchez.

NE-LV Your project El paso del Ebro (2013–15) articulates an experience that once again merges collective memory and personal adventure through heterochrony: the Battle of the Ebro, in 1938, one of the bloodiest of the Civil War; memories of your mother’s family, who hailed from there; and your weekly train journeys between Alicante and Barcelona, from 2013 to 2020, when you were a teacher at the Escola Massana. Consisting of diary entries written while on the train, some photographs, a video and five weavings in hues of blue and red, this work shows the rupture of everyday life. The first fabric, a piece of cloth your grandmother used to keep bread, denotes the fear and violence of a war whose aftermath and relics can be seen in the permanent exhibition in La Trinxera in Corbera d’Ebre: objects retrieved from the trenches of the Ebro and domestic objects repurposed from war materials, demonstrating the resourcefulness and imagination that can keep one alive in times of dire need.

TL Twice a week, as I sat on the train, I would anticipate the moment we crossed the Ebro River. In the distance was La Terra Alta, and beyond, somewhere lost on the horizon, Horta de Sant Joan, where my grandmother is from and where we used to spend our holidays. Now my nieces and nephews do, and soon their children will too. As a child, I heard stories around the fire, often about the Battle of the Ebro, and I would piece these together in my mind as the train approached the river and revealed the riverbed, the waterlogged rice fields and the mountains, where soldiers defending the Republic and Catalonia crossed the river on the night of 25 July 1938 and were discovered and killed. Unlike other works of mine that have tended to go on in time, this one is concise, and I do not know if I will continue it. I stopped working on it because imagining all that suffering, during and after the battle, filled me with anguish and sadness. I was only able to carry on in the form of a journal, which would be published. I recently learned that the cloth that inspired my series of weavings (in which red makes a reappearance, muddying the waters, so to speak) was used by my grandmother to wrap the dough, once she had mixed the flour and the sourdough, and let it ferment a while before turning it into bread.

‘The countryside begins to signal the proximity of the Ebro. Suddenly, the river, the flooded rice fields and the canals that supply water to the neighbouring fields. Small rice shoots show where not so long ago a tractor ploughed. A lorry crosses the bridge over the A-7 just as the train crosses the river upstream, near the spot where a group of civilian-soldiers waded into the Ebro on the night of 25 July 1938.’¹