Abstract
The internationally known Spanish multimedia artist Francesc Torres has created two interrelated photographic memory projects, a museum installation and the 2007 book of photographs on which the exhibit was based, both titled Oscura es la habitación donde dormimos (Dark Is the Room Where We Sleep). The installation was first shown in the International Center of Photography in New York City between September 2007 and January 2008 and then traveled to Barcelona, Spain, to be shown in a retrospective of Torres’s work, entitled Da Capo, at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) from June through September 2008.1 Torres’s exhibit and book document the 2004 exhumation in a small Spanish town, Villamayor de los Montes (in the northern province of Burgos), of the mass grave containing the bodies of 46 Republican men and boys killed by right-wing forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. The book presents black and white photographs detailing the entire process of exhuming the mass grave in 2004 as well as color photographs of the 2006 ceremony during which the bodies, after having been identified by a forensic team, were reburied in a collective tomb, or mausoleum, within the confines of the town cemetery.2
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Notes
Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 15, 70.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), 92.
Quoted in Sergio Gálvez Biesca, “El proceso de la recupración de la ‘memoria histórica’ en España: Una aproximación a los movimentos sociales por la memoria,” International Journal of Iberian Studies 19, no. 1 (2009): 25.
Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009).
Notoriously, Republicans were represented by Francoist rhetoric as the incarnation of the “Anti-Spain,” which Franco’s forces needed to exterminate through what they called their “crusade” to save the soul of the country. On the violence of the Franco regime, see Morir, matar, sobrevivir: La violencia en la dictadura de Franco, ed. Julián Casanova, Francisco Espinosa, Conxita Mir, and Francisco Moreno Gómez (Barcelona: Crítica, 2002);
and Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (New York: Norton, 2012).
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 115.
Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, trans. Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 14.
Layla Renshaw, Exhuming Loss: Memory, Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2011), 168.
Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller, and Jay Prosser (eds), Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 15.
Brett Ashley Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 168.
Fred Ritchin, After Photography (New York: Norton, 2009), 139.
Ariel Dorfman, “The Missing and Photography: The Uses and Misuses of Globalization,” in Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death, ed. Jack Santino (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 256.
On “breaking the enemy,” see Helen Graham, “The Spanish Civil War, 1936–2003: The Return of Republican Memory,” Science and Society 68, no. 3 (2004): 318.
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourningand the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 2006), 5.
Manuel Reyes Mate, “Lorca, un desaparecido,” El País, December 27, 2009. http://elpais.com/diario/2009/12/27/opinion/1261868405_850215.html (accessed March 28, 2013).
Francisco Ferrándiz, “De las fosas comunes a los derechos humanos: El descubrimiento de las desapariciones forzadas en la España contemporánea” Revista de Antropología Social 19 (2012): 186.
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© 2013 Marc Silberman and Florence Vatan
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Ferrán, O. (2013). Grievability and the Politics of Visibility: The Photography of Francesc Torres and the Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War. In: Silberman, M., Vatan, F. (eds) Memory and Postwar Memorials. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343529_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343529_7
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