The exercise books of anti-Franco prisoner Manolita del Arco are not simple instructions for knitting. Of course, they constitute a guide to knitting with four or five needles, what we commonly call knitting and each letter corresponds to a movement of these needles… But this language has been lost. And we know there is something else, which we also cannot decipher. These tickets belonged to women imprisoned by Franco. They camouflaged their political communications, among themselves and resiliently abroad.
We spoke with professor and writer Esther López Barceló, who published the book “The Art of Invoking Memory” and who tells us the story of these women and their anti-Franco struggle in their embroidery notebooks. We also spoke with the writer Miguel Martínez del Arco, son of Manolita del Arco, who is the current owner of the notebooks and who tells us the story of his family.
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