Of hideouts and heterotopias

La artesanía del saber: sonidos, objetos y enigmas en la memoria de las infancias en el exilio

“…Yo estaba ahí jugando con los muñecos Star Wars y fue como: uuuuuuh… Los pequeños fragmentos cotidianos permitían a los niños de entonces conocer, a su modo, las situaciones de violencia provocada por la represión dictatorial. En esta línea, la idea de la agencia infantil implica además considerar que la vulnerabilidad y la inocencia entran en juego con la conciencia sobre el conflicto político que rodeaba a los niños y niñas (Maguire, 2018;Llobet, 2018;Castillo, 2017). Aunque significativamente distinto al conocimiento adulto, los niños y niñas de entonces, se relacionaron de forma cotidiana y afectiva con las consecuencias de la violencia autoritaria.…”

Orphans at play in Cría cuervos (1976) and Estiu 1993 (2017): Reconsidering the playspace

“…53 Play is practical as a tool for understanding, and it is political as, through play, the children gain narrative agency in the playspace and the cinematic space. As Geoff Maguire argues of Infancia clandestina, 54 the focus on the child's perspective grants children 'a sense of narrative agency and, through a more complex understanding of the child's subjectivity, [allows] for a more critical perspective to emerge' 55 -in this case, the effects being those of La movida and the linked AIDS crisis on the later generations. In both films, the play worlds have an explicit connection with the social, as the children use the socio-dramatic to play through traumatic, lived experiences from their memories.…”

“…As Maguire states in regard to Infancia clandestina, 62 the film 'provides a filmic space in which the child's agential interactions with and within the domestic domain allow for a more complex examination of these intergenerational tensions'. 63 The game is a prevalent childhood trope in many Spanish horror films in order to build on the uncanny nature of children in horror. Hide-and-seek as seen in the films considered in this article, however, offers a chance for the children to enter their own playful realm, in which they hide from each other and take pleasure from being hidden and found.…”