Exhibition: “The democratic skylight. Policies of life and death in the Spanish State (1868 – 1976)”

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Exposición: “The democratic skylight. Policies of life and death in the Spanish State (1868 – 1976)”

The exhibition critically reviews the relationships between death, politics and democratic memory regarding contemporary Spanish history, from a horizon of human rights and cultures of peace.
The tour raises a mature debate of the collective past on political violence, as well as the ways to resist it, fight it, discuss it and remember it, proposing historical alternatives, resistance approaches, rejections and adaptive strategies. The first part goes through the citizen struggles from the democratic six-year term to 1936; a second module focuses on the Civil War; a third is dedicated to the dictatorship, to lead, lastly, to the origins of the Transition. Through these dissidences, revolts and daily practices, democratic rights were built. As a whole, it is a long tunnel of the past where the shadows and lights of history can still be seen. With a story that is sensitive to dissidence, opposition and daily practices over the last hundred and fifty years, the project has 266 original works from 71 providers, all national, and is complemented by a large number of photographic and 11 audiovisual reproductions.
The name of the exhibition, Skylight, is a tribute to the celebrated work that Antonio Buero Vallejo premiered in 1967, “El skylight” where he proposes a science-fiction journey between two eras, the Spanish postwar period and the 25th century. In the piece, the inhabitants of a distant future are dedicated to investigating history: they have a “skylight”, a powerful vision machine that allows them to project fragments of the past onto their present. Thus, they reconstruct the lives of those who preceded them, to wonder how their dramas and demands, their struggles and their cruelties also belong to them.

Sala de Exposiciones La Alqueria
Nuevos Ministerios
(Madrid, Spain)
24 March-23 July 2023

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HERNÁNDEZ CASTILLO, Aída y ROBLEDO SILVESTRE, Carolina (2020). Nadie Detiene el Amor. Historias de Vida de Familiares de Personas Desaparecidas en el Norte de Sinaloa

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Nadie Detiene el Amor.

Historias de Vida de Familiares de Personas Desaparecidas en el Norte de Sinaloa

In this book, Aída Hernández and Carolina Robledo, researchers at CIESAS, give context to the extreme, everyday violence in northern Sinaloa and share the experiences and struggles of relatives of disappeared people. The life stories they tell us are a way of remembering the absence. A way for their hearts to keep beating through the words of those who will not abandon the loving and challenging task of searching for them.

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PALACIOS GONZÁLEZ, Daniel (2022). De fosas comunes a lugares de memoria. La práctica monumental como escritura de la historia

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De fosas comunes a lugares de memoria

La práctica monumental como escritura de la historia

Within this book, I focused on the meaningful gestures of producing images using the bodies buried in the mass graves of the Spanish War and Dictatorship from 1936 until nowadays. The objective I proposed for this research was to define the historical development of monument practices and the forms they had taken, understand them in the society they seek to influence, and try to attribute a sense to them as meaningful gestures. I draw up my cartography of monuments in the country, with 600 records. But, far from seeking unity based on generalisations, I tried to find the logic underlying each of the experiences. To do so, I decided to take a broad sample and leave the quantitative study to approach the practices qualitatively. Accordingly, I selected a large selection of 100, which consisted of visiting the sites and interviewing those involved in these practices.
Additionally, in many of those sites visited, I also developed observation and participant observation in different rituals and events. I organised the book into three parts, each covering a stage of the analysis. In the first part, I answered the question of how the production of monuments evolved and what forms they took. In the second part, I answer the question of how monument practices were incorporated into the society they sought to influence. In the third part, I point out how we are not dealing with simple reactions that respond to the formal logic of tradition, but, on the contrary, they look for a specific and reasonable end goal, a result based on planning and consciousness.
In conclusion, I proved how the monument becomes an expression of the historical consciousness of its producers. How different actors communicated their memories in a meaningful gesture limited by the material reality integrating the bodies in constructing a new image. And how they seek to influence society, not just bury the dead according to a funerary tradition.

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VILLALTA LUNA, Alfonso M. (2022). Demonios de papel. Diarios desde un archivo de la represión franquista

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DEMONIOS DE PAPEL
Diarios desde un archivo de la represión franquista

Demonios de Papel is a journey into the depths of an archive of Franco’s repression. The tour, which begins in its corridors and storerooms, will take us to the multiple scenarios to which the documents it holds take us. Opening each of the boxes containing the summary trials of the dictatorship – papers that marked the end of the lives of thousands of people – takes us into a world that had remained hidden until now and that urges us with questions: can a military archive keep the soul of Franco’s dictatorship, can it safeguard and even protect the essence of Francoism, what happens when the doors that give access to the centre of the dictatorship are opened?
This book describes and analyses the complex relationship that every archive has with memory, with constant tensions between the memory it keeps and the oblivion it imposes. The book explores the politics of memory imposed in the moments of transition between dictatorship and democracy up to the present. From here it explores the ways in which debates about history, memory and justice have been reactivated. In conclusion, in this work the reader will be immersed in the complex management of these roles, accompanied by reflections on how societies forget and remember a traumatic past.

https://www.comares.com/libro/demonios-de-papel_139741/

 

Agonistic Memory and the Legacy of 20th Century Wars in Europe

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This book discusses the merits of the theory of agonistic memory in relation to the memory of war. After explaining the theory in detail it provides two case studies, one on war museums in contemporary Europe and one on mass graves exhumations, which both focus on analyzing to what extent these memory sites produce different regimes of memory. Furthermore, the book provides insights into the making of an agonistic exhibition at the Ruhr Museum in Essen, Germany. It also analyses audience reaction to a theatre play scripted and performed by the Spanish theatre company Micomicion that was supposed to put agonism on stage. There is also an analysis of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) designed and delivered on the theory of agonistic memory and its impact on the memory of war. Finally, the book provides a personal review of the history, problems and accomplishments of the theory of agonistic memory by the two editors of the volume.

ISBN: 2634-6257

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Argentina Betrayed. Memory, Mourning, and Accountability

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The ruthless military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983 betrayed the country’s people, presiding over massive disappearances of its citizenry and, in the process, destroying the state’s trustworthiness as the guardian of safety and well-being. Desperate relatives risked their lives to find the disappeared, and one group of mothers defied the repressive regime with weekly protests at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. How do societies cope with human losses and sociocultural traumas in the aftermath of such instances of political violence and state terror?

In Argentina Betrayed, Antonius C. G. M. Robben demonstrates that the dynamics of trust and betrayal that convulsed Argentina during the dictatorship did not end when democracy returned but rather persisted in confrontations over issues such as the truth about the disappearances, the commemoration of the past, and the guilt and accountability of perpetrators. Successive governments failed to resolve these debates because of erratic policies made under pressure from both military and human rights groups. Mutual mistrust between the state, retired officers, former insurgents, and bereaved relatives has been fueled by recurrent revelations and controversies that prevent Argentine society from conclusively coming to terms with its traumatic past.

With thirty years of scholarly engagement with Argentina—and drawing on his extensive, fair-minded interviews with principals at all points along the political spectrum—Robben explores how these ongoing dynamics have influenced the complicated mourning over violent deaths and disappearances. His analysis deploys key concepts from the contemporary literature of human rights, transitional justice, peace and reconciliation, and memory studies, including notions of trauma, denial, accountability, and mourning. The resulting volume is an indispensable contribution to a better understanding of the terrible crimes committed by the Argentine dictatorship in the 1970s and their aftermath.

Author: Antonius C. G. M. Robben

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An Archaeology of the Contemporary Era

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An Archaeology of the Contemporary Era approaches the contemporary age, between the late nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, as an archaeological period defined by specific material processes. It reflects on the theory and practice of the archaeology of the contemporary past from epistemological, political, ethical and aesthetic viewpoints, and characterises the present based on archaeological traces from the spatial, temporal and material excesses that define it. The materiality of our era, the book argues, and particularly its ruins and rubbish, reveals something profound, original and disturbing about humanity.

This is the first attempt at describing the contemporary era from an archaeological point of view. Global in scope, the book brings together case studies from every continent and considers sources from peripheral and rarely considered traditions, meanwhile engaging in an interdisciplinary dialogue with philosophy, anthropology, history and geography.

An Archaeology of the Contemporary Era will be essential reading for students and practitioners of the archaeology of the contemporary past, historical archaeology and archaeological theory. It will also be of interest to anybody concerned with globalisation, modernity and the Anthropocene.

Author: Alfredo González-Ruibal

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What Remains. Bringing America’s Missing Home from the Vietnam War

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For many families the Vietnam War remains unsettled. Nearly 1,600 Americans—and more than 300,000 Vietnamese—involved in the conflict are still unaccounted for. In What Remains, Sarah E. Wagner tells the stories of America’s missing service members and the families and communities that continue to search for them. From the scientists who work to identify the dead using bits of bone unearthed in Vietnamese jungles to the relatives who press government officials to find the remains of their loved ones, Wagner introduces us to the men and women who seek to bring the missing back home. Through their experiences she examines the ongoing toll of America’s most fraught war.

Every generation has known the uncertainties of war. Collective memorials, such as the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, testify to the many service members who never return, their fates still unresolved. But advances in forensic science have provided new and powerful tools to identify the remains of the missing, often from the merest trace—a tooth or other fragment. These new techniques have enabled military experts to recover, repatriate, identify, and return the remains of lost service members. So promising are these scientific developments that they have raised the expectations of military families hoping to locate their missing. As Wagner shows, the possibility of such homecomings compels Americans to wrestle anew with their memories, as with the weight of their loved ones’ sacrifices, and to reevaluate what it means to wage war and die on behalf of the nation.

Author: Sarah E. Wagner

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The stone dictatorship

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The Valley of the Fallen, between a black past and an uncertain future

The Valley of the Fallen was designed to cast the shadow of Franco’s dictatorship and perpetuate the power of the victors over the defeated. Neither the Transition nor Spanish democracy has managed to dispel the secrets and opacity surrounding a monument that is sadly unique in Europe today. How was its construction financed? Who were the slave workers who worked for a decade? Who are the spoils that crowd the crypts? What symbolism hides its architecture? Who is and what does the challenging prior of the order of monks guarding the monastery of the Valley think?

In this book, historian Queralt Solé and journalist Sílvia Marimon illuminate the darkness surrounding everything related to the Valley of the Fallen up to the present day with rigor and an eagerness to disseminate information. They ask themselves a question: once the controversy over the tomb of dictator Francisco Franco has been overcome, what should be the destiny and function of this place?

Authors: Sílvia Marimon y Queralt Solé

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Necropolitics

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In Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side—what he calls its “nocturnal body”—which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian debates on biopolitics, war, and race as well as Fanon’s notion of care as a shared vulnerability to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude but as a person with whom to build a more just world.

Author: Achille Mbembe

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