Between 2019 and 2020 Tomoko Yoneda traveled throughout Spain in order to produce the series entitled El sueño de las manzanas [The Sleep of Apples] commissioned by Fundación MAPFRE on the occasion of the exhibition dedicated to her work organized in 2021. The title of the series is a reference to one of the verses in Federico García Lorca’s poem Gacela de la muerte oscura [Ghazal of Dark Death]: “I want to sleep the sleep of apples / far away from bustle of the cemeteries.”

An array of spaces and histories converge within the ensemble and have the Spanish Civil War as their common denominator, while the Granada-born poet hovers over the series as a whole. Yoneda searched for the key locations of battles that took place during the conflict; a journey she superimposed onto the memory of García Lorca’s itinerant theater, La barraca, which is retraced by the artist through photographs of some of his personal items. Like most of her work this series deals with the footprints of the past that are still present and the how they apparently disappear without a trace. In Puestos de observación [Observation Posts] the structures emerge amidst a barren landscape where it is unlikely to find anything to turn one’s gaze to, except perhaps the phantasm of a violent past.