We’re All Just Fine

Artist Ana Penyas’s grandmothers Maruja and Hermanina live alone in their respective Spanish towns, largely neglected by their children and relatives, who never visit. But when Ana comes to see them, she realises that these women, whose day-to-day existences now seem mundane, experienced firsthand an incredibly tumultuous and fascinating period of Spanish history. In ‘We’re All Just Fine’, Penyas weaves the memories of her grandmothers to craft a narrative quilt that pieces together what it was like for women to assimilate to Spain’s dramatic political and cultural shifts in the late 1970s and ’80s. The sudden transition from the authoritarian, repressive Franco regime to lively and liberating democracy was at once incredibly freeing but also destabilising for women used to their traditional roles as dutiful housewives.