Today, this Radar is not looking for the latest news about artificial intelligence. It is pointing somewhere else. Towards Federico García Lorca.

Ninety years ago, he was arrested in Granada and extrajudicially killed somewhere between Víznar and Alfacar, alongside other people targeted by the repression. The exact date remains a matter of historiographical debate: reconstructions place the shooting in the early hours of either 17 or 18 August, although other dates were defended for decades. Nor do we know the precise place where he was buried. His remains have never been identified.

We know his poems, his plays, his drawings, his letters and his photographs. We can reconstruct journeys, friendships and conversations. Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba can be performed anywhere in the world. But we still do not know where Federico is.

The missing body

Ian Gibson has spent decades trying to answer that question. On 21 May 2026 he published No me encontraron. La fosa de Lorca: crónica de un olvido (They Did Not Find Me. Lorca’s Grave: Chronicle of an Oblivion), reconstructing the failed search of 2009 and the subsequent years of hypotheses, mistakes, silences and investigations into the whereabouts of the remains. For Gibson, finding Lorca would also mean something beyond the poet himself: his disappearance symbolises the thousands of people who remain in mass graves and roadside burial sites.

Anthropology has spent decades asking what happens when a death cannot be fully incorporated into social life because the body is missing. Francisco Ferrándiz has conducted ethnographic research on the exhumation of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War and Francoist repression. His work shows that opening a grave is never merely an archaeological or forensic operation. Around the remains emerge families, associations, institutions, photographs, objects, emotions, political conflicts and different understandings of how a person should be mourned and remembered.

In Anthropology of the Body and Emotions at the Complutense University of Madrid, we examined precisely these differences. Some memory organisations place the decisions of individual families at the centre; others emphasise the collective political dimension of those who were killed. Exhumation makes visible the fact that kinship, identity, dignity, memory and belonging continue to be negotiated around a set of bones.

A corpse is not merely matter. It remains relational.

María García Alonso has studied one of the great asymmetries in the memory of the Spanish Civil War. For decades, those associated with the victorious side were able to recover many of their dead, bury and commemorate them and create public spaces of remembrance, while a vast number of victims of repression remained in roadside ditches and mass graves, outside institutional memory. The later emergence of those bodies also transformed the ways in which the past could be narrated collectively. There is a concept discussed in Ritual and Belief that is especially useful here.

Political afterlife: the relations of power that continue to act upon a person after death: who may recover the body, identify it, bury it, visit it, mourn it, or decide how it will be remembered.

Power does not always end when a life ends. It can continue to administer the corpse.

And it can continue to administer mourning. Not every death receives a monument. Not every name enters the history books. Not every body returns.

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo turned such absence into one of the most powerful political images of the twentieth century. Their history is not equivalent to Lorca’s, but their experience helps us understand something fundamental: knowing that somebody was killed does not necessarily bring disappearance to an end. Recovering a body, burying it or having a place to visit also forms part of mourning.

In Federico’s case there is an additional complexity that should not be erased. His family has historically defended the idea that wherever the remains may lie should be preserved as a collective place of memory for all those killed there, rather than transformed exclusively into the poet’s grave. That position belongs in the story precisely because it reminds us that there is no single legitimate way of relating to people who have disappeared.

Federico has countless places of memory. What he still does not have is a grave that we know contains Federico.

Naming the violence too

Lorca did not simply die ‘in the Civil War’. He was arrested and executed within the machinery of repression unleashed in Granada after the military coup of July 1936. Ramón Ruiz Alonso, a former CEDA MP previously linked to the JONS, led his arrest; José Valdés Guzmán, a participant in the military conspiracy, an early Falange member and head of the Falangist militias in Granada, directed from the Civil Government a campaign of repression that cost thousands of lives.

Research differs over the exact composition of the firing squad that killed Lorca, so there is little value in simplifying the history by attributing every phase to a single organisation. That uncertainty is also part of the historiographical problem itself: the clandestine nature of the repression, the silences of those who took part in it and fragmented documentation still shape both what we can reconstruct and what remains disputed.

What we do know is that his arrest and murder took place within the coup-driven and fascist violence unleashed in Granada. Nor should we continue to surround another part of his story with euphemism.

Federico García Lorca was gay. His sexuality does not, by itself, explain his murder — Ian Gibson has explicitly warned against such a reduction — but neither was it irrelevant. It formed part of the accusations and the language of persecution surrounding him. Ruiz Alonso targeted him, among other things, for his homosexuality and political associations; later Francoist police documents described him using the homophobic language of the period and added accusations of left-wing politics and Freemasonry.

Naming this matters. Because remembering Lorca while concealing something that also made him a target would be another, far gentler but still recognisable, way of selecting which Federico we find comfortable enough to preserve.

Federico is not only the person they killed

Every anniversary carries another risk: remembering the death better than the life. Federico García Lorca was 38 years old.

He had written poetry and theatre, drawn, played music, directed La Barraca and experimented with artistic forms that resist confinement within any single tradition. He wrote about desire, authority, gender, inequality, frustration, constrained bodies and lives that did not fit easily within the social norms of his time.

And a few years before his murder he had arrived in New York. Poet in New York emerged from that experience of 1929 and 1930, also marked by the Wall Street Crash.

What he found there was not simply the spectacle of the great modern metropolis. He found something he could not bear.

The dawn of New York has four columns of mud.

Silvia Ruiz Tresgallo has studied precisely the connections between ecology and capital in the collection. Her analysis shows how Lorca perceived an economic system that simultaneously exploits natural resources and human productive capacity, and whose horizon ceases to be a better life and becomes accumulation. In Lorca’s New York, architecture, technology, nature and economics cease to inhabit separate worlds.

Wall Street therefore acquires enormous symbolic force. Other studies have shown how the financial heart of the city becomes associated with an almost apocalyptic landscape, while Lorca’s gaze repeatedly turns towards those left at the margins of that modernity.

Especially towards Harlem. Lorca observes a city simultaneously marked by extreme wealth, racial segregation, exploitation and loneliness.

We do not need to turn him into a prophet of our present. That would diminish what he achieved.

He was looking at his own present. He looked at a society obsessed with money and also saw the bodies that wealth needed to keep beneath it. He looked at machines and wondered what kind of life they were building. He looked at Wall Street and saw accumulation, but also suffering. He looked at the modern city and found violated nature, racism and isolation.

Almost a century later, those questions remain uncomfortably familiar.

Poetry that happens to us

There are texts we study. And there are texts that also happen to us.

Poet in New York can be one of them. Jo Labanyi suggests that we should think of emotions not simply as properties contained within a person, but ask what they do: how they circulate among bodies, objects and worlds; how they produce relationships; how something created at another time can continue materially to affect those who encounter it decades later. Poet in New York appears precisely in her work on emotion, affect and materiality.

Perhaps that offers one way of understanding why we still read Federico. A poem written almost a century ago can enter another body, another time and another city and do something again.

It can unsettle. It can move us.

It can give words to a feeling that did not yet have them. It can make us look differently.

Recovering humanity

From the perspective of historical anthropology, and following the work of Ana María Lorandi, the past cannot be reduced to a sequence of events or to what an archive happens to preserve. Understanding it also requires us to recover the humanity of historical subjects by attending to their experiences, relationships, silences, symbols and forms of agency. This approach restores human depth to lives that large-scale narratives can otherwise reduce to a single documentary line.

Lorca was subjected to a radical attempt at erasure. Kill.

Hide the body. Deny the grave.

Then censor parts of the life and the work. Searching for Lorca does not mean needing a set of bones to prove who he was. We know who he was. It means recognising something more elementary: there is an additional violence when a society cannot return to a murdered person their name, their body and a place.

The saca reversed

Yesterday, 17 August, a sculpture of Federico once again travelled through Madrid. It was a work by Fernando Sánchez Castillo, created from a photograph of Lorca during the years of La Barraca and currently included in La perla peregrina, the Museo Reina Sofía exhibition at the Palacio de Velázquez. The sculptor deliberately moved away from solemn, sorrowful representations of the poet: his Federico is smiling, arms raised, almost jumping.

The performance Saca nocturna, organised by La Juan Gallery as part of Cultura Orgullosa 2026, took a word associated with one of the most terrifying mechanisms of repression — removing detainees at night to take them to their execution — and turned it upside down. This time Federico emerged surrounded by people.

Those who symbolically began the ‘abduction’ also carried a banner bearing words from ‘Gacela de la muerte oscura’:

I want to sleep for a while, a minute, a century, but let everyone know I have not died.

There was music, poetry, dance and collective accompaniment from the Palacio de Velázquez to Plaza de Santa Ana. The fact that the action formed part of Cultura Orgullosa is not incidental either. The programme, promoted by Spain’s Ministry of Equality in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture, is dedicated to giving visibility to LGBTI+ artistic creation and to sexual, gender and family diversity.

Ninety years later, something that was used to persecute him can be publicly named as part of his life. One night they took him away.

Ninety years later, another crowd carried him away again. But this time something even more unsettling happened.

On reaching Santa Ana, Rata Bellucci made the sculpture disappear. Someone among those who had followed the procession summed it up: ‘They took him away, just like that day. We are left without Lorca.’

The action that seemed to return the body therefore ends by returning us to its absence. There is no reassuring restitution.

There is no Federico who finally remains in the square. He is there.

And then he is missing again. Perhaps that is where the anthropological power of the ritual lies: it does not attempt to symbolically repair the irreparable until the wound disappears beneath a celebration. It stages the absence again and obliges those taking part to experience, even if only for a few moments, the void around which ninety years of memory have been constructed.

The sculpture disappears. The crowd remains. And Federico returns to where he has been for ninety years: present in his absence.

A radar for Federico

A radar usually detects signals travelling towards us. Today we wanted to use it the other way round, not to locate, but to transmit.

The signal travels towards Granada, towards Víznar and Alfacar, towards land that still holds unnamed bodies, towards the families who are still waiting and, finally, towards Federico.

Ninety years later, we still have not found him. In the meantime, we keep reading him. Because they tried to make a body disappear. And they could not make a voice disappear.

References and further reading

Ferrándiz, F. (2018). ‘De la lágrima al píxel: corrección política y emociones digitales en las exhumaciones de fosas comunes de la Guerra Civil’. In L. E. Delgado, P. Fernández and J. Labanyi (eds), La cultura de las emociones y las emociones en la cultura española contemporánea: siglos XVIII-XXI. Madrid: Cátedra, pp. 293–318.

García Alonso, M. (2018). ‘¿Qué es lo que quieren ahora si nosotros ya les habíamos perdonado? Resistencias y transformaciones de la memoria de los vencedores de la Guerra Civil española’. Eolles (Est Ouest Langues Littératures Echanges Sociétés).

Gibson, I. (2026). No me encontraron. La fosa de Lorca: crónica de un olvido. Madrid: Aguilar. Published 21 May 2026.

Labanyi, J. (2010). ‘Doing Things: Emotion, Affect, and Materiality’. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 11(3–4), 223–233.

Lorandi, A. M. (2012). ‘¿Etnohistoria, Antropología Histórica o simplemente Historia?’.

Ruiz Tresgallo, S. (2018). ‘Asedios a la ciudad moderna: acercamientos ecocríticos a Poeta en Nueva York de Federico García Lorca’. Ulúa. Revista de Historia, Sociedad y Cultura, 31. https://doi.org/10.25009/urhsc.v0i31.2589

Teaching materials and notes from Anthropology of the Body and Emotions and Ritual and Belief, BA in Social Anthropology, Complutense University of Madrid.

Online sources