We have institutions and associations. We have Academia and Consello da Cultura, we have faculties of history, we have newspapers that despite the apparent uniformity are of varied orientation with the same centre. We have political scientists with no known profession, sociologists, and economists. We have an autonomous government that does not like autonomy, we have our own television that almost never seems to be autonomous. We have a long list of narrators who even have time to compete on social networks. We have a bit of everything, including a cultural system that has been mortally wounded for ten years. We have what it takes and yet the recent history of Galicia had to be told in theatres. It happened on three or four occasions at least and without making a very scientific account. We are talking about the contemporary history of Galicia: the one that goes from the croquettes with the remains of Castelao until, more or less, now. We are talking about the history we all go through. <\/p>
The first obvious case was Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o, who recapitulated Galicia’s recent disappointments from the tragedy of renunciation in Rastros to the offensive humour of Criaturas. Nobody wanted to seriously understand those portraits because why look bad in a mirror when you could watch television? Nobody wanted neither in the novel, nor in the cinema, nor even in journalism, to take to heart the reality of Galicia as to turn it into that defiant witness that we are like this, but we are not here. <\/p>
The other recent case of how recent history becomes fiction, with almost all the consequences, is the assault on the reality of Ch\u00e9vere who, taking advantage of the heterodoxy of humour and pop culture, decided to become a documentary filmmaker about this disappearing world. The decision has a notarial sense: they are chroniclers, but we are the ones who are disappearing as we know ourselves. In more than one sense. The decision has an internal logic for the company, but it also has a logic of the environment. In Galicia, the reality is understood as something untouchable, irremediable and, in a certain manipulative sense, inexplicable. Galician reality is like magic: it is forbidden to explain the trick. In this situation, Ch\u00e9vere became fanciful to explain some of the country’s realities by metaphysics and from Citizen <\/em>onwards it began to rummage in the weak points of reality to explore its wounds. In perspective, for the company, the reality is what happens and all the machinery to tell it. Reality is what happens and all those transmission belts through which nuances are lost. Perhaps it should not be like that, they will say that theatre is for other things. But the fact is that the told reality of recent Galicia has a better story in the theatre. It has the most nonconformist and, perhaps, for this reason, the clearest. <\/p> The fearful lack of fiction about the present in the country perhaps points out a character trait, perhaps a suffocating weight of reality in only one sense, perhaps it points out the misery of escapism about everything that happens to us, and it could also serve to illustrate the political panorama. In the Galician police, they never kill a president of the Xunta. Sometimes a councilman falls, and sometimes an opposition leader and writers are also victims. This must mean something about us and our relationship with power. With the real and with the symbolic. <\/p> Ch\u00e9vere is attracted to reality. Even when it is a sum of fiction that is difficult to contrast, as it happens in Curva Espa\u00f1a. They are attracted to reality and its deformations, so that even taking Valle-Incl\u00e1n unamused in Galician in Divinas Palabras Revolution (2018), the idea of the company is to push the work against that which seems to be understood as hyperreality, to show that it is only the appearance of a reality doped with all the resources of fiction. Between Citizen <\/em>(2010) and Curva Espa\u00f1a<\/em> (2019), there is a journey in Ch\u00e9vere that seems to go from the particular to the general, that seems to feed on elements that in other cases remain beyond explanation. In those nine years, the group deepens in the idea of documenting itself, of going back to reality, not to realism. It deepens in the research, in the referents, also in the rupture of the processes that distance the companies from reality. To have the encounter with the public only after the play. Ch\u00e9vere searches before getting down to business on the stage in the arguments to handle. It could be understood as opening an argumentative circle that will return to the spectator, but in Galicia, the symbolic explanations always weigh too much to make them all true. It should be more oxygenation in the environment, or the demonstration that no matter how good the arguments are, reality is more capable, has more possibilities and has more hands and more heads. Reality is a better author. Reality is the one who orders the most. <\/p> Between Citizen <\/em>and Curva Espa\u00f1a<\/em> is Eroski Para\u00edso<\/em> (2016). There are some procedural relationships between them, but the ways are very different. The method from the particular to the general is here fully applied because this story of discos and supermarkets, of tractors and weekend dances, of people from the mountains and the sea, of dust and cemeteries (I could write loves and cemeteries, but we must go to what is important), of emigration and return, this story of the diluted memory of a generation is the contemporary history of Galicia that now repeats itself with digital adjectives but with the same miseries. It is a history that has been run over by the steamrollers of the times and needs to be rescued. It is not certain that it is completely the Galicia of the eighties, that decade in which we went from being a country without agricultural revolution to being a postmodern country. Because we were always a nation without a state of mind. It is certain that the points of departure and arrival of the work are true, they are still here, among us, but not for the news. Ch\u00e9vere makes reconstruction, but not biography. What goes between the Para\u00edso nightclub and the supermarket that now occupies its place in Muros is that defeat announced as a victory: that of the deception of classes, that of the paradise of the middle class, that of the asphalted Galicia. The company explains the now and the before in the same line, as an interpreted consequence. As a flashback to the living and this may be the only realistic way to do it: to the past we only travel from here.<\/p> It is certain that in a decade we went from being something we didn\u2019t like to being something other that we do not know exactly what it is, but we know perfectly well where it brought us. Eroski Para\u00edso<\/em> tells the story of the transfer without transition from one country to another from a memory that may seem kind, but not carefree. The play and the feature film that follows it reconstruct a past. It is a near past. From immediately before there were terraced houses in Galicia. A little before the shoulder pads on American jackets. A minute before the world ceased to be analogical. Now it may seem like another era, but it is this same era without Twitter. Ch\u00e9vere proposes a story in which a film wants to reconstruct a moment. This is how memory operates, digging through the data and organizing the events as a moving image. This is how memory tells us about the past. We could even say that this is how it deceives us. <\/p> Ch\u00e9vere’s handling of history has to do with the handling of the company with whom it was told. There is a generation in Galicia that was born in a house without electricity or running water and today lives in the same house asking Alexa to turn on the TV. It may well be the generation with the greatest capacity to adapt to social and technical changes in the history of Galicia. The youngest of that generation appear in Eroski Para\u00edso<\/em> with the intuition that they are the last ones who crossed that border. A border that linked them to a radically different past. And not only because of the circumstance of living in analogic. Perhaps it was that time when there was still a direct relationship between what you worked for and what you ate. Perhaps it was the last time in which social relations were direct. <\/p> Ch\u00e9vere documents that time that was and how people lived in the farewell of the era. They do so by contrast because while they rescue the images of the past, are forcing the viewers to make comparisons with the present. It’s not that there are conclusions to be drawn, it’s that they are there. Not now, not then. The present is bad and there is no good past. The past is only previous. But past and memory are not the same things, even though there are a lot of people confusing, maybe intentionally, the two terms. Para\u00edso operates on memory because the past is a political territory in which arguments are sought for the manipulation of the present. Memory is what we have. The rest is science fiction and that is not what Ch\u00e9vere proposes.<\/p> What the company proposes is to bend time and make two moments coincide in the same space. In that territory many stories take place, most of them familiar, most of them sentimental, there are some comical and some others that threaten drama. But everything is contained by that distance that memory imposes on the facts. That distance sometimes seems kind and can appear to be historical objectivity. Eroski Para\u00edso<\/em> manages that distance. The ideal distance. Memory has chemical reactions, it is quite possible that it tends to de-dramatize certain particular events while it dramatizes the collective ones. It is possible that memory sweetens things. Perhaps it concentrates on what has been experienced rather than on its interpretation. It may be that memory, as it functions in each one of us, is not an archiving mechanism but a reconstruction mechanism. And that its function is not to keep us informed but to keep us whole. There is a theory about how memory works: it concentrates on what it considers important and when it is time to remember and fill in the gaps, what it does is incorporate data consistent with those it preserves, not the authentic ones it did not focus on. Memory operates as fiction: the important thing is the coherence of the story. With memory, it happens to us as with almost everything: we prefer our own, even when we only remember that there was snow. With memory, it happens to us as it did to the United States with General Noriega. It can be dastardly, twisted or treacherous. It can be the worst in the world, but it is ours. <\/p> But in Eroski Para\u00edso<\/em> Ch\u00e9vere does not operate as memory but from memory. The work initiates a sort of prospecting about returning to the place to which one belonged and finds that memory is not so easy to guide. It has its own preferences and takes almost everything on the invariably human side, preserving the sense of humour that liberates the weight. It may be that the material from which the work is born, the experiences of the neighbours of Muros, tilt to that side. It may be that varnish with which memory furnishes the stories, or it may be that these stories are either looked at in this way or are left to rest in peace. These are too serious matters to make a drama out of them. It may be that the story is lived as drama and remembered as comedy. The work seeks in detail the endorsement of a reality that was. Because Ch\u00e9vere takes as a starting point a recognizable space and experiences: Sunday dances and calamari sandwiches. Couples who get involved, fathers who emigrate to work with daughters who emigrate to study. Well looked at, the very life of Galicia. But not for all. There will be a class that does not feel recognized in the story beyond folklore or humour. It is all in that history that someone is reconstructing for the cinema and yet Ch\u00e9vere does not want to go to the document. Because, just as memory is not the past, theatre is not reality. It does not go directly to the document, but the sum of the parts offers that interpretation. There are people who survived an era in that way. Rejected. Fugitives. Screwed, but happy. Almost.<\/p> For the play, in the theatrical version and in the film version, there are two lines that run parallel. The one that happened and the one of how it is recovered. In a sense, there is no way to be consistent with one without explaining the other. The protagonists are not very sure that their memory has value, that it is important. For the one who recovers the story, that memory means origin. Paradoxically, the work may seem melancholic in that trip to the past, in narrating the world like an episode of Starsky & Hutch<\/em>. But the real melancholy of the work is to explain passively that all that disappeared world has no interest in the future. If I wanted to get into an academic muddle, I would say that there is something Oterian in the background. But this year it is Carvalho Calero\u2019s and that is another spelling. <\/p> We happen to use a sense of humour and think of comedy. But the semantic field of the syntagma is much larger. Para\u00edso has a very sharp sense of humour. Sometimes comical and sometimes painful. Although these two circumstances are far apart for the audience, they are very close in the process of storytelling. The company’s sense of humour is very, very broad. The biography of the comedian still has an influence on it. But we have to think about the times. Ch\u00e9vere comes from parody. And we have parody as a humorous genre, as a tool for gags. But we must not lose sight of the times, and parody, today, is the contemporary genre par excellence. Parody works with the same mechanism of reality, but with a different purpose. We would say that the best parody is the one that is indistinguishable from reality, and there are many media working very convincingly on it. Ch\u00e9vere does not use parody for humour, it uses it to talk about reality and not to do realism. It is on the edge and that is why in the same play we can see how a family eats calamari sandwiches or imitates Saturday night fevers and see almost without interruption how whoever attends the fish section in a supermarket leads the spectators to the painful truth. <\/p> In the double line of the play, it also happens that the humour seems to be more in the past than in the present. The dramatic tension of the play is in the reconstruction of the story rather than in the events that are the protagonists. For those who lived through it, what happened is much more important than the blurred consequences it may have in the present. It is a combination, and it may happen that Eroski Para\u00edso does not want to define itself despite the evidence of comedy. <\/p> Four years after its premiere in Muros, Eroski Para\u00edso is an investigation, a play, a book and a feature film. It would be necessary to draw attention to this idea that what is important are the stories and the rest are supports. To draw the attention and go back to the beginning of why the theatre unwittingly took on the task of telling the story of the country that was piled up behind the housing developments and behind the Xunta’s posters announcing the asphalting of the roads. The stories that defined a country that was always afraid to define itself so as not to disturb. <\/p> This report was published in Luzes, n\u00ba 77. 2020 <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In Muros there is no more paradise. There is a supermarket. It may seem a matter of the real estate market, but it is a radical change of era without transition. It is the story of a country that does not want to make history. Ch\u00e9vere made history with Eroski Para\u00edso, from theatre to cinema. A story between squid sandwiches and couples who get pregnant in the cemetery. Memory and humour that does not always make for a few laughs. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":66743,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[191],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-280867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fatiga-ocular-en"],"acf":[],"post_template":"reportaxe","post_subscription":"no","pretitle":"Eroski Para\u00edso","content_extract":"We have institutions and associations. We have Academia and Consello da Cultura, we have faculties of history, we have newspapers that despite the apparent uniformity are of varied orientation with the same centre. We have political scientists with no known profession, sociologists, and economists. We have an autonomous government that does not like autonomy, we...","reading_data":{"word_count":"2686","reading_seconds":"644","reading_time":{"minutes":10,"hours":0,"seconds":44},"reading_string":"10'44''","reading_human":"11 minutos"},"announcement":{"finishdate":"","finishdate_text":""},"opinion":{"subject":"","subject_info":[]},"event_info":{"startdate":"","starttime":"","enddate":"","endtime":"","entertainer":null},"interview":{"interviewed":""},"phototext":{"text_author":"","text_photo":""},"video":{"video_source":""},"promotion":{"action":"default","action_data":""},"categories_list":[{"name":"Eye strain","id":191,"slug":"fatiga-ocular-en","parent":0,"template":"default"}],"visible_author":"Camilo Franco","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280867"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280867"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":295192,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280867\/revisions\/295192"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/66743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}