Despite the sun of justice that fell on Barcelona last Sunday at noon, around a hundred people gathered in a square in the Sagrera district to listen to two women: Carmen Urbita and Ana Garriga, better known as ” Felipe’s Daughters. From Madrid and Salamanca, they are the authors of a podcast Pódimo Podcast on “historical gossip” and “baroque dramas” whose motto is: “Remember, everything that happens to you has already happened to a nun with 16th and 17th centuries. “”.
On this principle, in a humorous and relaxed tone, for four years they have shared forgotten anecdotes from the golden age, with nods to feminism, lesbians and the reappropriation of the casual and the intimate as part of the story.
“Las Hijas de Felipe” closed the current edition of the Biennale of Thought with a live episode on baroque obsessions of the future and figures such as Fray Juan del Pozo, Felipe II, Francis Bacon and Lucrecia de León. But as always, they did it with lightness and concern, not wanting to plunge their audience into what they define as “paralyzing chronophobia”.
Why are we called “the daughters of Philip”?
Ana Garriga: The provisional name of the podcast, but which did not work in Spain, was A blast with the past [Un buen rato con el pasado]. In 2019, while we were working as editors at an academic journal, where we still work, they took a photo of us. We were in a really bad phase of the PhD and the photo came out horrible. Our faces look like shit, lots of dark circles under our eyes… We feel like we look a lot like the daughters of Philip II. And there it remained.
Carmen Urbita: And we are still Felipe’s daughters. We don’t lose the dark circles.
You met while doing your doctorate in the United States, where did the idea for the podcast come from?
CPU: We were held in Providence (Rhode Island). We felt quite alone. Every chance I got, I listened to podcasts and wondered why not make one ourselves? Not for the purpose of making it work, but simply to record us discussing our topics. And the trigger was the pandemic, because since we were separated, it was a way to maintain that connection and those little chats that we couldn’t have in person.
Its postulate is the following: “everything that happens to you today already happened to a nun in the 16th and 17th centuries. How did this interest in Baroque nuns arise?
AG: The first years of doctorate in the United States were very hard and in the long nights of writing we really found a grip in these texts, seeing that there were little people of the Baroque who had suffered as much as us, or even more.
CPU: We texted each other in the morning, fed up and quoting a nun as if to convey the same anxiety we felt. We have always repeated the quote from an Augustinian Recollette nun who said: “It is extremely repugnant that it is necessary to write as much as it is necessary to write, being like me. »
Why do you think we don’t know more stories about Baroque salseo?
CPU: The first episodes come from our own investigations. In academic format, these were just a small footnote, but they seemed like very juicy anecdotes to us. We touch on the golden centuries, which are here super-charged with meaning. They have always been politically exploited with a very masculine, very epic, very canonical narrative. The feminine, the intimate, the everyday are always left aside.
AG: We claim kitsch and intimacy. Convents are full of papers from nuns who wrote the lives of other nuns, who wrote themselves. There is a whole subjectivity that no one has told and which interests people. It’s not of great interest, but when corners of history and the past are told where we can see ourselves reflected, the attachment is much greater.
In the podcasts, they often explain stories involving women, lesbians and convents. To many, this may seem like an odd combination. Did you have any problems talking about it?
CPU: We usually don’t have much hate As surprising as it may seem. A Dominican friar listens to us as well as a person who was doing drag at the Apolo yesterday. However, during a live broadcast from the Prado Museum’s Instagram account, Ana wore a t-shirt that read “I was a lesbian child.” [Yo era una niña lesbiana] and we speak of epistolary exchanges between nuns. We didn’t even say the word lesbian, but we received a lot of comments like, “If these nuns would just look up and know that you were insinuating that they were lesbians…”
All these people have obviously not read the words of Saint Teresa herself, of the Jesuit moralists, of the people who write about how to avoid lesbianism in convents. And that’s because it existed.
Did you think you would have such an audience when you started?
CPU: We didn’t even imagine it would be on the docks. More than increasing the number of listeners, we were very excited about the idea of reaching very different worlds. We did an episode very early on called “The Baroque Brick Boom” on real estate speculation at that time and this episode opened the way to the world of architects who had never been interested in history and who suddenly came and stayed with us.
His podcast claims intimacy. What do you think about doing live episodes like this from the Biennale?
AG: We are very happy to see the people who come. It’s very flattering.
CPU: And it’s scary.
AG: But we want to innovate in the field of live performances because we really appreciate them.
CPU: Soon we are going to realize a dream: in Santiago de Compostela, we are going to do a live show in a desecrated Baroque Jesuit church and it is going to be incredible.
In today’s episode, you called for calm in the face of the future. What would you say to those who want to study humanities degrees like you did?
AG: It’s a very complicated path. The podcast saved our lives. At all levels, from the most material to the most spiritual.
CPU: One thing we always say, and this applies to all students in general: do things with your friends. It went very well for us. If you have a collective project with your friends, it will work.
AG: And as our producer Jesús Blanquiño told us: if you’re very interested in something, it’s never just about you, you’ll always find a community to challenge.
What is this community that you are questioning?
CPU: Today, for example [en la Biennal] Listeners in their fifties came, accompanied by their pre-teen daughters.
AG: It’s the first time we’ve seen such small people in the audience.
Are they linked to the public?
CPU: A listener once wrote to us on Instagram and told us that she thought her daughter was a lesbian, but the girl didn’t say anything.
AG: Because he lived in a small town in Castile-La Mancha.
CPU: She told us that, to tease her daughter, who was also listening to the podcast, she said to her: “Do you know that Felipe’s Hijas are lesbians? » and the girl’s face lit up. Honestly, that’s the nicest thing they’ve ever said to us.
