1. Fairy Tales

Sleeping princesses and frog-princes, talking ducklings and home-building piggies, quirky cats, children lost in the forest, vengeful witches and kind fairies. These and other more-than-human beings are the protagonists of the stories our guardians often tell us before bedtime when we are children. These characters, who inhabit fantasy worlds and embody the symbols and archetypes that shape the collective unconscious, easily find a way through stories to infiltrate our young subjectivities and shape their development. Filled with magic and morals, fairy tales offer us a limited number of possible paths according to the character assigned to us at birth, pointing out the dangers and the beauties of a series of imaginary scenarios in which we must unfailingly choose between good and evil, between following the path or turning away from it. However, these stories did not always have children as their favoured audience. Part fantasy world, part realms of terror, they are tales born of oral folklore. Passed down from generation to generation, putting into words the collective experiences of millennia-old peoples, they took the form of written tales to be read in European courts and salons in the early seventeenth century. Under the spell of the Enlightenment maelstrom, they were compiled by writers such as Charles Perrault, Madame d’Aulnoy, Henriette-July de Castelnau and Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, whose early, stylised versions of European popular lore reflected the encyclopaedic, classifying and colonising spirit of the age, but spared neither lurid nor morbid details for an adult, privileged and idle public.

In Fantástico Interior, La Casa Encendida, Madrid, December 2022.