Curated by Melissa Dinverno

In Suites, Lorca conceived of the book of poetry as a transformed world that the reader passes through on a voyage both temporal and conceptual.In Suites, Lorca conceived of the book of poetry as a transformed world that the reader passes through on a voyage both temporal and conceptual. The Suites collection itself comprises a set of juxtaposed poetic series, each one its own world, and the reader enters, exits, and jumps between them. Curated by Melissa Dinverno and produced by the Centro Federico García Lorca Consortium, this exhibit takes up this vision, juxtaposing two different ways of experiencing Lorca’s book -through its textual materiality and its conceptual perspectives- on a two-part voyage through the world of Suites.Many of the Lorca’s documents exhibited (manuscripts, typescripts, letters…), owned by the Archive of the Federico García Lorca Foundation and preserved at the Federico García Lorca Centre, are displayed to the public for the first time.
From the entrance to the exhibition space to its exit, this exhibit takes up this vision, juxtaposing two different ways of experiencing Lorca’s book—through its textual materiality and its conceptual perspectives—on a two-part voyage through the world of Suites. The poetic collection Suites marked a before and an after in Federico García Lorca’s career, profoundly impacting his literary vision, his poetics, his understanding of the profession and his reputation as a writer. Nonetheless, Suites remains one of Lorca’s least-known works, in large part due to the vicissitudes of the Spanish Civil War and exile. Written mainly between 1921 and 1923, revised until 1936 and planned for publication in book form multiple times, Suites never saw publication as a collection until its first critical edition in Spanish was released in 1983. Since then, new scholarly work has reformulated the book, its texts and the projects that underpin them, and invites us to appreciate Suites’ influence on Lorca’s later work. Based on this new research, Suites and the Voyage of Perception offers a state-of-the-art vision of the collection, leading the reader on a dual journey: the first, a temporal one, follows the project’s textual life from 1920 to 1936, from its initial sketches to its further development and publication plans; and the second, a conceptual one, constitutes a voyage through one of Suites’ central endeavors: that of transforming the way we perceive the world.