During the 1920s, Madrid underwent great demographic and urbanistic growth that resulted in a bustling and effervescent capital. Spain’s neutrality during the Great War turned the city into a centre of encounter and exchange where everything that was new converged. Although the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera was ruthless in its persecution of political dissidence, it was much more permissive in terms of morality and social mores. The result of all this was a city that lived and grew to the beat of modernity, scarcely different to Europe’s other great capitals. During those years it kept pace with the times, it also did so in terms of the visibility of sexual diversity. The events that took place after the 1930s have stolen the memory of that Madrid from us, confusing us with a false image of obscurantism and backwardness. 

Through a series of biographies of people, most of whom are related to one other, this exhibition reconstructs those years and remembers those who lived and walked on these same streets. It is the Madrid of Alvaro Retana, Antonio de Hoyos and Tórtola Valencia, of José de Zamora and Edmond de Bries, where Lorca, Cernuda, and Aleixandre met at the Residencia de Estudiantes hall, the city too of Victorina Duran and Gregorio Prieto.

Through their lives and work, this exhibition recovers and asserts a memory of Madrid that is very different from the one we have been told about until now.