“La feria abandonada” (“The Abandoned Fair”) is a collection of twelve melancholic texts created by Spanish artist Pablo Auladell together with two of his friends, journalist Rafa Burgos and poet Julián López Medina. Stylistically distinct, these poetic short pieces share a common atmosphere of loss and quiet sorrow – stories of places we will never return to and beings we will never meet, of things that have slipped away forever, sinking into the river of oblivion and eternity.
Pablo Auladell is an award-winning illustrator and cartoonist. He has represented Spain at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair and received the Second National Prize for his illustration work. He also teaches at the Italian illustration school Ars In Fabula.
For many years, the book about the abandoned fair existed only as scattered sketches stored in one of the folders on his tablet. Aside from these fragments, it already had a title – the first thing Pablo invents for any of his stories, because, as he believes, what has no name does not truly exist.
When the number of sketches grew, Pablo began looking for a suitable poetic narrative, but nothing seemed to fit. So he decided to write it himself.
He had little literary experience, having previously written only short texts for his own comics. Pablo asked his friends Burgos and Medina to collaborate, convinced that their different poetic voices would enrich the project.
He then carefully selected the texts that resonated with the overarching narrative – those that, as he says, the book itself demanded, like an autonomous and mysterious creature living by its own laws.
At the same time, he continued refining the drawings. The most challenging part was developing the right technique. Pablo wanted the visual narrative to evoke Mediterranean frescoes – aged textures and imagery reminiscent of Spanish painting and once-popular Spanish festivals.
Piece by piece, over the course of a year, the entire book came together – a kind of nostalgic testimony to the slow fading of a familiar, seemingly unshakable world, to the gradual erasure of a beloved landscape that now exists only in memory.
Thanks to the collaboration with Burgos and Medina, the book gained additional layers – Julián’s philosophical, conceptual texts blending with Pablo’s lyricism and Rafa’s grounded, almost documentary tone.
“Now it all feels so distant and ghostly: every morning I would sit down and, with a kind of suicidal enthusiasm, draw these sketches using the simplest tools – a pencil, a few pastel tones, charcoal, anything that could scratch into the surface…
Bob Dylan says that when he listens to his own songs, he feels as if someone else created them. I feel something similar when I look at these carefully chosen illustrations and polished, orderly texts. Left behind are dozens of failed drawings and crossed-out paragraphs, negotiations with publishers, and the inevitable, quiet undercurrent of disappointment.”
