“Mudanza” is based on two critical moments in the history of 20th-century art: the evacuation of museum collections such as the Prado and the Louvre, and the exile of numerous artists during the Spanish Civil War and World War II.

In 1936, with the military coup and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, works by Velázquez, Goya, Ribera, Rubens, Dürer, etc., were evacuated in trucks due to the lack of safety. One week before the bombing, the Prado Museum was emptied of thousands of paintings that were sent to Valencia and then to Geneva, via Figueras. Many spaces were left empty, ghostly, with traces, marks on the walls, and empty frames.

With the war came sudden exile, forced displacement, and moving. Among the many European refugees welcomed by Mexico were the Hungarian Emerico “Chiki” Weisz and the British Leonora Carrington. Chiki, who had been Robert Capa’s assistant, arrived from France in 1942. Leonora Carrington arrived the same year. They met and married in 1946 in the home of the Hungarian surrealist photographer Kati Horna, at 198 Tabasco Street, the same address where the Arróniz Gallery is currently located. This coincidence led me to revisit the images of the “Mexican Suitcase”—over 4,000 unpublished negatives taken by Capa during the Spanish Civil War, which disappeared between 1939 and 2007 after Chiki handed them over to the Mexican ambassador in France for safekeeping. These images became the starting point for the new drawings included in “Mudanza.”