Icarus by Mireya Folch-Serra

Mireya Folch-Serra

Mireya Folch-Serra was born in Tarragona, Spain, during the Spanish Civil War. Coming from an anti-Franco refugee family, she lived in exile in France, Mexico, and later Canada. She studied and worked across diverse cultural contexts, including Toulouse and Mexico City, before settling in London, Ontario, in 1994. There, she served as a professor of Geography at Western University, focusing her research on silenced collective memory and historical injustice in contemporary Spain, often through the lens of Bakhtin’s dialogism applied to art and landscape. Upon retiring as Professor Emerita, she devoted herself fully to artistic creation. Among her most memorable experiences was participating in “Drawn In” at the Royal Ontario Museum— a collective drawing action protesting the Iraq War—later exhibited in Toronto and London, Ontario. Her work reflects a lifelong engagement with memory, displacement, and social justice.