PHotoESPAÑA Adelaida: Exploring Memory, Identity, and Gender in a Photography Exhibition

This exhibition, part of PHotoESPAÑA, delves into the memory and visual history of Adelaida Martínez-Corera, a woman who defied societal norms at the turn of the 20th century. It combines archival photographs from the Hausmann collection with AI-generated imagery to reconstruct her life and challenge historical representations of femininity.

Adelaida is an immersive visual exploration into the traces of memory, reconstructing the story of a woman who, from the margins of her era, defied the codes of her class and gender. In the cusp of modernity, between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Adelaida Martínez-Corera embodied a silent yet potent dissent. As a widow and mother, she took on the management of a building in Lavapiés, transcending imposed limitations and asserting herself as an active subject in a society that relegated women to the private sphere. This reconstruction unfolds in a constant dialogue between the archived and the imagined. The Hausmann photographic archive, comprising carte de visite and cabinet portraits, presents a visual atlas of the 19th-century bourgeois world, revealing both its constraints and its cracks. These images question the historical iconography of femininity and its absences, evoking what time has sought to silence. Simultaneously, the generation of images through artificial intelligence intervenes in this cartography of the unsaid, proposing never-before-captured scenes and moments, now emerging in an exercise of visual restitution. Inspired by historical documents and the pictorial aesthetics of the era, these images expand the boundaries of representation and reformulate the status of memory in the digital age. The figure of Adelaida becomes even more palpable through original documents that carry the density of time. This proposal is set within the Museo del Romanticismo, contextualizing the world in which Adelaida was born, a witness to a society on the path to modernity.

Access to the temporary exhibition is free. Guided cultural mediation tours are also free but have limited capacity and require prior reservation. Visit information and booking can be found via the provided link.