Resistance by Artist Lúa Coderech
I was walking through SMAK, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, Belgium. In the middle of the exhibition, a few tears crept into the corners of my eyes. Her voice was raspy, searching, distraught, trembling.
I closed my eyes and tried to understand what she was saying. It sounded like Spanish mixed with Catalan, which also meant, quite literally, feeling my way in the dark. And yet, I did not need to understand her to feel the impact of her words. I walked over to the artist’s nameplate and suddenly everything fell into place. I read: Lúa Coderech (°1982, Peru).
Around this time last year, I was in Madrid and discovered her work at The Ryder Projects. It was her first solo exhibition with the gallery, and immediately one of my favourites in the city. It is remarkable that immediately, even without seeing anything, I was once again deeply moved by her work.
Homenaje desviado (para cuatro abuelos nacionales), 2015
This ironic tribute is dedicated to the artist’s four grandparents, all of whom were staunch Francoists during the Civil War and subsequent dictatorship. The work is a tangle of contradictions and raises multiple questions: to what extent can a person distance themselves from their origins? Where does individual freedom end, and where does deception or ‘ideological support’ begin?
Several years ago, Lúa Coderch immersed herself in the graphic archive of the CNT-FAI, an anarchist trade union confederation based in Barcelona at the end of the Civil War. The material is now housed at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Compromising photographs, posters, prints, and other documents, the archive has been stashed in 47 wooden cases and sent to the Institute for safekeeping. This was to prevent the material from being used to incriminate those who had actively participated in the Republican movement. Coderech’s research made her aware of the gap between her family backgrond and this chapter of Spanish history.
In photographs of her grandparents from that period, they appear in the uniform of the right-wing Falange, taking part in events with Franco himself. In keeping with personal convictions, and fully aware that her family history stand in opposition to a democratic vision, Coderech decided to learn songs from the Republican repertoir, melodies that were, of course, absent from her family’s musical tradition. She practices them in a broken voice. The combination of the two photographs and accompanying audio recording of her learning the songs with a distraught voice, is beautifully haunting.
You can visit the exhibition until 8 March 2026 at SMAK. I also particularly liked the video work by Eli Cortiñas and the installation by Carlos Aires.
Thank you for that! Powerful.