Typically Spanish

Who gets to embody Spain? Through staged bodies, queer solidarity and the cross-dressing of national symbols, "Typically Spanish" challenges the heteronormative imagery of a nation and imagines new ways of belonging.

Typically Spanish

How many dissident lives quietly sustained the very traditions that seemed to exclude them?

I grew up in Andalusia, southern Spain, where mantillas (traditional lace veils), carnations, flamenco and religious processions are not relics of the past, but symbols that continue to inhabit our streets, our bodies and our collective imagination.

My relationship with these images begins within my family. Pedro, whom I called Tato, was a dressmaker who privately wore women's clothing during Franco's dictatorship. Rejected by his aristocratic family, he raised and cared for my grandmother, a singer and domestic worker. He made her dresses and the costumes of my childhood. I grew up surrounded by sewing, fantasy and forms of love and care that exceeded conventional family structures.

Under Franco's dictatorship (1939–1975), homosexuality was persecuted, while many women faced surveillance and institutional control for challenging prevailing moral expectations. Yet queer lives, cross-dressing and gender dissidence were also part of Spanish families, streets and popular culture.

Rooted in this memory, and in dialogue with figures such as Federico García Lorca and Ocaña, Typically Spanish? explores the visual construction of national identity through staged portraiture.

In the fields of Brunete, a landscape marked by memories of the Spanish Civil War, contemporary bodies inhabit and reinterpret inherited symbols. Mantillas, fans, traditional clay water jugs, flamenco fringes and crinolines coexist with sequins, high fashion, rural landscapes, painted chairs and everyday rituals.

What happens when we queer the codes of tradition? Who gets to embody its symbols? Can artifice become power, luxury an act of recognition, and affection a form of resistance?

The body becomes a political subject. Theatricality and extravagance open spaces for fantasy and splendour, while embraces, desire and queer solidarity suggest other forms of care, community and belonging.

Moving between visual anthropology, memory and fiction, the project questions who has historically been allowed to represent Spain and what other images might emerge from the lives that have always inhabited it.

Typically Spanish is an ongoing photographic project. Its next stages include the collection and incorporation of family photographs and historical documents, alongside the creation of a visual catalogue of traditional Spanish objects, garments and symbols, exploring their histories, political meanings and possibilities for reinterpretation.

How might we expand tradition without erasing its history? And what happens when those seemingly excluded from its representation finally occupy the centre of the image?