The California College for the Arts (CCA) Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts presents Viaje a la luna (A trip to the moon), an exhibition inspired by the only screenplay ever written by the renowned Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. Curated by Diego Villalobos of the Wattis Institute and CCA alumnus Rodrigo Ortiz Monasterio, the exhibition will be on view from June 12 through Oct. 11, 2025, before traveling to Centro Federico García Lorca in Granada to open Oct. 30.
The life of a poet
Federico García Lorca was one of the most influential Spanish poets of the 20th century. As a poet and playwright, he was part of the artistic vanguard and instrumental in pushing Surrealism to the foreground, thereby bringing the avant-garde to the people through his art. Lorca grew up in Andalusia, on the outskirts of Granada, a region with a rich history and presence of Roma (Gypsy) and Arabic communities. He worked during a time when fascism was on the rise as an artist who was both gay and leftist. Lorca used his work as an opportunity to tell stories that drew on vivid metaphors and imagery to express his identity and give voice to marginalized communities.
During the late 1920s Lorca moved to New York and interacted with the Harlem Renaissance, where he met influential writers like Nella Larssen and Langston Hughes, who would eventually translate some of Lorca’s works into English. He also met Mexican painter and filmmaker Emilio Amero, who became a close friend and confidante.
In a single feverish night, Lorca drafted his first and only screenplay and convinced Amero to turn it into a film. The filming began in Mexico in 1932. Lorca’s script was a surrealist vision divided into 72 loosely connected short scenes that were mystical, romantic, and violent. The film covered themes of societal repression and persecution, told through a series of characters who don’t feel comfortable in their own skin. Unfortunately, the film never came to fruition because of the poet’s untimely death. He was such a powerful presence in his native country that General Franco’s Nationalist army assassinated him during the early days of the Spanish Civil War. Lorca was shot and placed in a mass grave, and despite efforts to find his remains, he is often cited as “still among the missing.”
A screenplay reinterpreted
After his death, Lorca’s film production halted, and the reel was eventually lost in a fire in Mexico City. It faded into obscurity as another unfinished project. The only remnants of the screenplay are the script itself and a handful of photographs taken during production. Haunting drawings by Lorca, created in New York, are included along with photograms by Amaro done in New York around the same time. The vision for Viaje a la luna returns to life with this ephemera along with several contemporary artists reconstructing the forgotten story and reflecting on thematic throughlines of the screenplay that continue to resonate today. Here are the artists: Emilio Amero, Diane Arbus, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Nina Canell, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Ajit Chauhan, Tania Pérez Cordova, Federico García Lorca, Rosalind Nashashibi, Francesco Pedraglio, Álvaro Urbano, and Danh Võ.
Lorca was part of the artistic vanguard and instrumental in pushing Surrealism to the foreground, thereby bringing the avant-garde to the people through his art.
Álvaro Urbano presents a sculptural work commissioned for the exhibition that recreates a silhouette of Lorca’s balcony in Granada and meditates on his execution. Text work from Danh Võ made for a festival in Seville, based on a line of Lorca’s poetry, commemorates the poet’s execution and the death of a bullfighter.
Rosalind Nashashibi’s meditative film work, Denim Sky, takes as its departure point thematic throughlines of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Shobies’ Story, which has echoes of Lorca’s film, including her exploration of nonnuclear family structures and communal forms of living. A sculptural work by Nina Canell poetically considers the impact of technology on everyday lives — a question relevant to Lorca, who worked as fascism rose to the fore and technology became a tool for warfare.
The exhibition is a negotiation between the past and the present. An unfinished film, incomplete because of violence, echoes our contemporary political climate, which saw its incompleteness and adorned it with new visions. In Viaje a la luna, the Spanish Civil War, the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism in the West speak to our own time, marked by extreme political polarization, censorship, and rampant social inequalities. Viaje a la luna, in its incompleteness as a permanently unresolved project, creates space to dream of a different outcome to the struggles we still face today.
“The exhibition will take visitors on a mysterious journey, unearthing the lost film and establishing a dialogue between Lorca’s personal history and the screenplay,” said curator Diego Villabos. “It will elucidate how art, for Lorca, was a refuge and a place to forge an identity, a distressed search for love as a way to indirectly express his homosexuality and politics. At a time when politics are having a heightened impact on the arts, delving into an artist’s coded exploration of identity in conversation with contemporary artists feels ever more relevant.”
