La Ida (No Return)

The Tenerife-born artist María Belén Morales (1928-2016) completed this sculpture in 1999 in memory of the detainees of the Francoist detention centre known as ‘Fyffes’ that once stood close to this location on the Avenida Reyes Catolicos in Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

The plaque reads, ‘To the memory of those who suffered persecution, imprisonment and death in the prison “Faife” (Fyffes)’. It joins the significant number of works in Santa Cruz that were installed as part of the two International Exhibitions of Sculpture in the Street (1973 & 1994).

The title of the work ‘La Ida’ can be translated variously as ‘the one-way-ticket’, ‘the outward journey’ or ‘the going away’ which probably refers to the fact that a substantial number of those imprisoned were either executed, died from illnesses related to the poor conditions there or simply ‘disappeared’.

The sculpture takes the form of a concrete platform covered with a steel plate on which stand two tall thin geometric wooden pieces (one vertical, one at an angle). The two wooden pieces are joined were they cross, and the angled wood piece is supported by a sharp-angled, steel geometric shape.

The detention centre was known as “Faife” (a spelling taken from the Spanish pronunciation) because the building was formerly a warehouse of the British company Fyffes, which had begun cultivating bananas on Tenerife in 1922. The managers of Fyffes were anxious to collaborate with the Nationalists who had quickly taken control of Tenerife. The British owners of Fyffes thus relinquished the property to Franco’s regime, which had quickly filled the existing prisons after the July 1936 uprising. During its years of operation—until 1950—over 4000 people were incarcerated there at one time or other.

Notably, several writers from the Tenerife-based avant-garde literary magazine Gaceta de Arte were detained in Fyffes, including Domingo López Torres (1907-1937), Domingo Pérez Minik (1903-1989), and Pedro García Cabrera (1905-1981) the former of whom was transferred to a floating prison-ship off Santa Cruz and executed (by drowning in a sack) in February 1937.