Project team

Alireza Darvish

Alireza Darvish is a painter, illustrator, and film creator. He trained in Tehran, where he began his career as an illustrator and art instructor, and since 2000 he has developed his career in Europe, residing in Cologne, Barcelona, and Prague. He has collaborated with literary journals and film studios, working on numerous international feature films as head of digital painting and as an animator. He has also served as a jury member at film festivals and as a university lecturer in the field of animation. His artistic work—combining painting, illustration, and digital media—has been presented in more than thirty solo and group exhibitions in Europe, the United States, and Iran.

Carlos Sanz Díaz

Carlos Sanz Díaz is Professor of Contemporary History at the Complutense University of Madrid and Director of the Department of Modern and Contemporary History. His research focuses on migration history, Spanish foreign policy, and the history of European integration, with particular attention to the connections between civil society, memory, and international politics. He has published extensively on Spanish workers in Germany under Francoism, their forms of mobility, and the role they played in the regime’s migration and foreign policy. His career is directly linked to the themes of this project, to which he contributes as an expert on migration history and Spanish–German relations. He currently directs the Jean Monnet Chair HISTEU on the History of Europe and European Integration, from which he promotes international cooperation and knowledge transfer initiatives on historical memory and Spain’s presence in Europe.

Carmen Pérez González

Carmen Pérez González traveled for two and a half years across Asia (from Turkey to China overland), carrying out socially oriented photographic projects. In 2001, the catalog of her photo exhibition Una mirada al trabajo de la mujer en Asia (A Look at Women’s Work in Asia) was published by the Instituto de la Mujer, Valencia, with the exhibition shown at the Museo Príncipe Felipe. She has worked as an exhibitions coordinator and curator in several museums, including the Museo de la Ciencia and CosmoCaixa in Barcelona, and the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne. In 2012, her doctoral dissertation Local Portraiture: Through the Lens of the 19th Century Iranian Photographers was published by Leiden University Press in the series Iranian Studies. Since 2014 she has taught the history of photography at the University of Wuppertal, and since 2023 she has supervised a curatorial project with students in the University Archive (Kurt Keil Archive).

Matei Chihaia

Matei Chihaia has been Professor of Spanish and French Literature at the University of Wuppertal since 2010. He oversaw the establishment of Spanish-language resources at the University Library of Wuppertal (https://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-2020-5200) and coordinated a series of activities around KIM’s graphic novel Nieve en los bolsillos. Alemania 1963: an exhibition, a student seminar, a scholarly workshop, and an interview with the author. This initiative can be regarded as a direct precedent of the present project, as it already addressed the migration from Béjar to the Remscheid region. He currently directs a research project on Spanish Republican exile, Autobiographical Narration and Female Authorship in Spanish Exile after 1936, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Mercedes Riba Hernández

Mercedes Riba Hernández is a writer from Béjar with a degree in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the University of Salamanca. Her book La emigración bejarana en Alemania (1960–1973). Aproximación sociológica, published by the Centro de Estudios Bejaranos in 2023, is an essential research work on Spanish labor migration to West Germany in the 1960s. Her most recent publication, in the Center’s 2024 annual journal, is titled "Las revistas de empresa. La chimenea de Textil Navazo S.A., Spindel und Schützen de Johann Wülfing & Sohn".