Joint presentation of the graphic novels:
- Dentro (Ilustropos, 2021) and Fuera (Ilustropos, 2022), by Isabel Ruiz.
- María la Jabalina (Astiberri, 2023), by Cristina Durán and Miguel Ángel Giner Bou.
The authors will be present and it will be presented by Tono Vizcaíno, curator of the exhibition Archaeology of the memory. The graves of Paterna.
Activity framed in the cycle of the project The graves of Francoism and organised by the Museum of Prehistory and L'ETNO.
Inside. After the end of the Spanish Civil War, the Franco regime began a period of repression and revenge that lasted for forty years. Thousands of people were executed and countless others were imprisoned without trial. Women's prisons became warehouses for prisoners where extreme conditions of overcrowding, torture, hunger and deprivation of rights led to terrible situations that history tends to erase. Dentro. draws on the testimonies of the survivors, as well as research into the genocidal practices in these prisons, to represent in a series of graphic accounts what that vital resistance meant for the political prisoners of Franco's dictatorship. It also serves as a well-deserved tribute.
Outside. After the fascist military coup, women suffered the total annulment of their rights and the model of the modern woman favoured by the Second Republic was persecuted and eliminated. The idea of the angel of the home, good wife and self-sacrificing mother was promoted, and this novel attempts to dissect the different methods used to condition their lives. The Sección Femenina, Acción Católica, the Patronato de Protección de la mujer and the Auxilio Social were some of the institutions from which the re-education and domination of the female population was carried out. In this context of indoctrination and terror, women had only four options for living: connivance, silence, exile or struggle.
Isabel Ruiz Ruiz (Úbeda, 1977) is an illustrator and director of audiovisual photography. She is the creator of a collection of illustrated books aimed at giving visibility to women of reference in different artistic and cultural, literary, scientific and philosophical disciplines. In her own words, "I have a degree in Fine Arts and a diploma in Photography Direction. As an author and illustrator I have published nine titles: La estación de las hojas, the five volumes of the Colección Mujeres, Mujeres españolas, Dentro y Fuera. In recent years my work as an illustrator has focused on giving visibility to women".
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María la Jabalina. María Pérez Lacruz, known as María la Jabalina, was the last woman murdered by Franco's regime in the Valencian Community. In 1942, aged just 25, she was shot at El Terrer, the sadly well-known wall in Paterna (Valencia). The young anarchist of the Juventudes Libertarias had grown up around the factory in Puerto de Sagunto, where the atmosphere of the workers' struggle was in the air. At the age of 18 she had the courage to enlist as a militiaman in the Columna de Hierro, where she worked as a nurse. She was probably the first woman to be wounded in the civil war. During the post-war repression she was denounced, arrested and unjustly accused of crimes she could never have committed.
Cristina Durán and Miguel Ángel Giner Bou, winners of the National Comic Prize for El día 3 (Astiberri, 2018), revive one of the many silenced stories of women who fought for peace and freedom and, in addition, they echo the deepest wish of the mother of the Javelina: that such a great injustice never falls into oblivion. María la Jabalina has been produced thanks to the initiative and support of the Department of Historical Memory of Sagunto City Council and is published in both Spanish and Valencian.
Cristina Durán (Valencia, 1970) and Miguel Ángel Giner Bou (Benetússer, Valencia, 1969) work professionally in comics and illustration through their studio LaGRÚAestudio, which they founded in 1993. Together they have published comics such as Una posibilidad (2017), Cuando no sabes qué decir (forthcoming in Andana Gráfica), El día 3, together with Laura Ballester (2018) and María la Jabalina (2023). For El día 3 they have received, among others, the Comic National Award 2019.
