Historias Gemelas (2006/2011)

Clara Rubio & Edurne Rubio

In an historical context where identity negotiates its living space with globalisation, “Twin stories” manifests itself as a project with a “Russian doll” structure. It incorporates different levels from the individual to the social, the personal to the cultural, the local to the global.

It’s a search for extraordinary and extreme social events in which contradictions, caused by the distance between global and individual development, makes the event appear as absurd or just hard to believe. Even if the incident may appear as very circumstantial and disparate, this event is nonetheless bound to repeat itself…

“Twin stories” are the narration's archive of these unbelievable repeated events. We call them twins because they resemble each other; they have common grounds. We don’t think that coincidence caused this repetition, we believe that these facts have the same social, economical or cultural background.

This proposal is the result of teamwork in which methodology and our experience in the fields of art and sociology are joined.

"Twin stories" is a project with several different shapes. It develops and is shown through radio, Internet, images but above all orally.

It extends in time and space. It has one beginning and many possible endings.

> Original Story #1 : "The scale model of Lorilla"

> Twin Stories (of Lorilla scale model)

> Original Story #2 : "La Engaña Tunnel"

> Twin Stories (of Engaña tunnel)

> Cronologie

> Press & publications

> Original Story #1 : The scale model of Lorilla.

(Burgos province, Spain. 1998)

In 1974, the last inhabitant of Lorilla left his house and the town, located on the border of three provinces, Burgos, Cantabria and Palencia, became totally abandoned. Today, there are only ruins.

Pilar Bárcena was born in Lorilla and lived there until she was 20. She got married and moved to a neighbouring town. At the time, Lorilla was a town full of life, and Pilar nostalgically remembers every person who lived there.

When she retired and stopped working the land, she decided to make a reproduction of the church of her beloved town. Her objective was to give her grandchildren the chance to know what is now nothing but ruins. Despite having no craft skills or building know-how, the copy of the church was a success, and it encouraged her to make a scale model of the whole town.

Pilar’s model of Lorilla, whose surface measures 2 by 3 metres, is an almost perfect copy of the original town. The buildings are made from the real remains of the town. When Pilar decided to make the model, she went to Lorilla with labelled plastic bags with the names of every family and took stones, rubble and remains that corresponded to every house. Later, in her workshop, she created miniatures of all the houses and buildings that once were occupied by Lorillas’ inhabitants.

The mix of material, historical and emotional details, but mostly symbolic ones, make the scale model a unique object.

> Twin Stories of the Lorilla scale model

> Back

> Original Story #1 : "La Engaña Tunnel".

(Burgos province, Spain) 1940-1960

Between 1941 and 1959, one of the longest tunnels in Spain was built, La Engaña Tunnel. Its purpose was to cross a mountain range as part of the Santander-Mediterranean train line, which was started during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923-1930) to connect the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean, Valencia and Santander.

A town was built, known as “El Túnel” (The Tunnel) to house the thousands of people constructing the tunnel. Engineers, railwaymen, republican prisoners, people from Galicia, Navarre, Portugal, Aragon and Burgos, carried out one of Spain’s most ambitious infrastructure projects. A hospital, a church, a school, bars, inns and houses were built during the tunnelling of Cotero de la Brena hill.

Almost 20 years later, in 1959, after 6,976 metres of digging, workers drilling at either end of the tunnel were finally able to shake hands. However, the initial joy gave way to disappointment; work could not continue since the project was stopped some months later. It was said that this was due to pressure from Bilbao since the port of Santander could gain more activity when connected to the Mediterranean. Both seas would have to wait to meet.

Today, the tunnel connects the regions of Cantabria and Castilla y León purely symbolically. On the Burgos side, next to the tunnel’s cold entrance, remain the ruins of the town that once housed its builders.

> Twin Stories of the Engaña Tunnel

> Back

> Cronologie

2007

Festival In-Presentable, La Casa Encendida, Madrid Spain
Radio Broadcast "El Ombligo de la Luna", Radio National España
Radio Broadcast - "Hoy por hoy", Cadena Ser, Spain
Plateaux Festival, Mousonturm. Frankfurt , Germany

2008

Espacio Tangente, Burgos, Spain
Ciclo "DOCUMENTE-SE! Reflexões sobre o social", Fundación Serralves de Porto, Portugal
Departamento de Sociología e Instituto de Sociología de la Universidad de Porto, Portugal
Radio broadcast “A historia da vida” (Radio Television Portugal )
Museo Etnográfico de Castilla y Léon, Zamora, Spain
III Festival de Cine Under de Paraguay. Asunción, Paraguay
Compiloteque, Brussels, Belgium