La Memoria Interior

María Ruido


This piece, the result of a trip to Germany in December 2000 and of a two-year-long research, is about the construction of memory and the mechanisms for the production of history.

Through the personal life story of the author’s family, the video examines the memory of the recent emigration to Europe from the Spanish state. The mechanisms of oblivion and memory are reflected upon and the notion of the construction of memory as a nexus and a dialogue is put forward. The video also presents us with the idea of the generation of this memory out of the personal experience, as opposed to the notions of history and official memory, both restricted to the institutional field and articulated around the aestheticization and dismemberment of political subjects.

As in her previous work, María Ruido insists on the capacity of all of us to construct history and on the necessity to articulate the personal and collective experience in order to constitute a politics of memory that is diverse and heterogeneous.

In addition, La memoria interior empasises the importance of the body as a topography of memory and absence, and as a political agent: the Spanish state’s politics of migration during the 1960s and 1970s was indeed a form of biopolitics and of workers’ control, whose consequences were, for the subjectivities involved, deeply unsettling.

The emigrant bodies are registered bodies, necessarily transient. They make up a flux of labour force that is forced to constant movement and are the remembered absentees who many years later return home.

This is a video about the restoration of these bodies and their labour, about the oblivions of this absence. The piece is instanced by the personal experience of the author herself and is marked by the need to remember and narrate this history in order to reclaim other forms of narration that stray from traditional hierarchies

Technical datasheet

  • Title: La Memoria Interior
  • Direction: María Ruido
  • Production: Ministerio de Cultura, Hangar. 2002.
  • Duration: 00:33:21
  • Languages: Galician - Spanish
  • Subtitles: English
  • Original format: High 8
  • Formats: Betacam Digital - DVD
  • TV systems: PAL
  • License: Copyright