They say there was a time when the forests of the Iberian Peninsula were so lush that a squirrel could travel from the Pyrenees to Cadiz by jumping from branch to branch. For Brigitte Vasallo, writer, researcher and cultural campaigner, the desertification of Spain is inseparable from the policies that led to the depopulation of the countryside, the destruction of rural life and the impoverishment of the millions of people who were forced to emigrate to the cities during the Franco regime.

Queixa is part of Vasallo’s new research project, through which she aims to recover the memory of the sons and daughters of that great migration and build a genealogy that shuns the logic of otherness. She does this with her characteristic simplicity and brazenness, recurring to the format of theatrical conference to engage in a kind of spoken writing or oral literature. To convey the stories of a generation that was branded ignorant and illiterate, Vasallo chooses to depart from the written word and instead speak out loud and in public.

Hers is the narrative of a counter-history of Spain, from the genocide of the Reconquista to the dirty dealings of the Güell family, or from the gender policies of Francoism to immigration museums. The artist highlights how the theft of the countryside entailed the planned destruction of a whole world, and of its own valiant form of existence. In Simbi en aigües astronòmiques, Inés-Sybille Vooduness explores a radical way of understanding the diaspora from geographical distance, while Vasallo uses water and plaster to paint the ephemeral landscape of a diaspora that is much closer to us and that has less to do with space than it has with a world to which we can never return.

“We deserve beauty,” Vasallo insists. Beauty and community. That is why Queixa seeks to be, above all, a story told out loud, this time specifically adapted to Terrassa. Just as Teatro do Frio’s Selva coragem invites us to build a collective sense of courage, Queixa also offers a place to meet and reimagine who we have been, who we are and who we can become.