Valencia del tranvía

The collective subconscious of Valencia is crossed by that blue tram with the blue flowerbox that went to the Malvarrosa. The Valencia of the nineteen fifties was not yet completely submerged in history nor had it fallen totally under the hammer or the deluge of plastic. This exhibition aims to rescue it from memory by means of a text and some images, which will one day fade too and become the quintessence of imagination: melancholy. The streets, squares, buildings and corners of that Valencia were once the scene of initiation for several generations of Valencians. Those spaces were often the prolongation of sensations and sentiments that formed their collective soul. The text of this exhibition has been taken from the novel Tranvía a la Malvarrosa, which I one day wrote as a sentimental record of a period of growth and learning. In the story, a boy in his late teens started to grow up in the midst of the feast for the senses of that still semi-rural Valencia whose forbidden pleasures were just about to burst at the seams. Now the text is accompanied by images of the city today taken by the camera of Joan Antoni Vicent as though from a world that refuses to disappear and pictures taken while making the film based on the novel taken by the same photographer in 1995 have been added. In this way the reality of a Valencia that is still standing and still alive the atmosphere of literature and the cinema is added to introduce us into the territory of dreams by means of fiction. It is a new walk around that Valencia through our collective subconscious.