Ruidos y susurros de las vanguardias - Medialab Prado

addition, List's character was used in a project of digital animation by the
multimedia editing team Digital Pueblo, of the University of New Mexico,
supervised by professor Walker Bumgarner-Kirby.
Miguel Molina
The Orden de Toledo (1923-1936)
This was not a military, knighthooh or religious order but the name with which Luis
Buñuel called a group of friends from the Residence of Students of Madrid, who in
their many alcohol escapes to Toledo, showed the same admiration for this city, as
well as the possibility of "being ready to live the most unforgettable experiences"
(quoting Buñuel).
This imaginary order was founded in 1923 by Luis Buñuel after having a vision
while he was drunk and heard the birds of the Cathedral of Toledo cloister.
He called himself "Constable" and created a variety of ranks: "Knights”" ( had to
be drunk a complete night and wander around the village), "Squires" (if they
decided to go to sleep before dawn), or others of smaller value like "Squires'
guest" and "Squires's guest's guest". Among the founder knights were poets
Federico García Lorca and Pedro Garfias and librarian Ernestina González,
student of Unamuno's. Other people also participated (from the Arts, Literature
and Cinema) who have been important in the Spanish and international culture
like Salvador Dalí, René Crevel, Rafael Alberti, Maria Teresa León, José Moreno
Villa, George Sadoul or Pierre Unik. The appointed " Secretary" Pepín Bello (who
had a great influence on many of them but has left almost no writings), would have
been 100 year old this year. They used to stay in places not mentioned in travel
guides (Posada de la Sangre or Santa Hermandad) and at night, after 1 a.m. (and
after having drunk all day long white wine from Yepes), they used to go out
wrapped up in sheets like ghosts and wandered around without direction - the
labyrinth of the streets of Toledo, to live personal experiences (many of them have
been described by Buñuel, Alberti, Moreno Villa and Dalí) .
Our interest to recover some of the experiences of this group of artists, include the
following: one of them because they propose another way to discover a city, away
from tourist routes, and inviting to wander and find experiences, which entails the
antecedent of “letting-go” of the Theory of the Dérive raised by the situationists at
the end of the 1950's, and in turn- a parallelism with the proposals of the European
avant-garde artists of the 1920's, like for example the Dada excursions and visits
to Paris that wanted to remedy the incompetence of the guides and cicerones and
they invited to those places with not a real reason to exist like going to an
abandoned church (Saint Julian le Pauvre), to the mortuary (by its sentimental
value) or to the Mont Blanc (by its historical interest).
The second important aspect that we have found is the relation of these
experiences with sound, since the members of the Orden left at night and Toledo
was barely illuminated and quiet, they had the opportunity to hear mysterious and
incongruous sound situations, which many authors have connected with
surrealist visions. In this sense, our research group visited Toledo to walk around
its labyrinth of streets and try to record those sound landscapes that they use to
listen ever since Buñuel had the vision to establish the Orden after hearing
thousands of birds in the gothic cloister of the Cathedral, even the nuns singing at
the Convent of Santo Domingo through its walls at dawn, or the "terrifying silences
- 163 -
" at night in Toledo or from Cardinal Tavera's sepulcher. Although we should not be
misled, the situation is not the same, Toledo is now much more illuminated and the
night silence is marked by the closing of bars and the noise of garbage trucks. But
Toledo survives this, and at dawn we were able to hear the nuns, the poliphony of
thousands of birds, and we managed to wander “walking on our steps” (as Alberti
said) without much effort. However, we did not find the white wine from Yepes
which the Orden used to drink, this 14.5 º mauve grape wine served to the
Archbishopric and the Court of Toledo in the past. We had to investigate and call
the Wine Cooperative of Yepes to find out where to buy it. However, the "tortilla a
caballo” (or cerdo a caballo), mentioned by Buñuel, that they use to eat in the
Venta de Aires had survived. There was where the only historical photographs
known of the Orden de Toledo were taken, and currently being refurbished, which
destroyed one of the drawings on the walls made by Dalí portraying all the
members of the order, with a total lack of consideration, although they had been
warned of the current value of the drawing.
A follow-up of this valuation of the sounds lived by the Orden - but this time
promoted by them, was the reading of poems that echoed on the walls the
different cultures that had lived in Toledo. This attitude to give a public voice to
poetry, to dialog with the stones, with the weight of history…, marks an avantgarde
attitude to participate in space of the events, to "make poetry" as the
situationists claimed, instead of a closed reading in institutional or private spaces.
The research work carried out by the group consisted of several stages: the first
stage was a journey through the places described by the members of the Orden
(Buñuel, Alberti and Moreno Villa) to document the visual and sound features, and
by comparing the Toledo of the 1920's with the city at the beginning of the new
millenium. In the second stage we reproduced some of their experiences, like the
"new theory of ghosts" crossing the city dressed in sheets, and reading aloud
poems on the street. We have read poetry written by the different members
(Lorca, Moreno Villa, Buñuel) at that time, and mixed it with sound documents
recited by the authors themselves (Alberti, Pepín Bello, Dalí, Buñuel).
We have also wandered the streets of Toledo even without trying walking and
working all night long until dawn as knights of a new order that we have called "La
desorden de Toledo", and we have outlined in a map of Toledo the resulting
labyrinth of our experience of three days and two nights, which will be part of the
reproduction works of this disordered order. Before the difficulty to find white wine
from Yepes in Toledo, one of the members of the Desorden, has designed for
these bottles with the purpose of promoting it- an enigmatic label that hides a
phantasmagoric presence, only revealable by fixing the eyes in a point and
drinking this magical wine that caused so many unforgettable visions and
experiences in the past.
This project will be continued by the Desorden de Toledo next year with the
promotion of a new "TouristTrans-Guide to get lost in Toledo", as an alternative to
the existing guides of the Jewish-Christian-Muslim city of Toledo, which will
describe how to get lost in unforeseen places and to avoid following the
programmed and prefabricated tourist circuit.