Resistance through Remembrance

INVITATION

On September 23, the presentation of the book „Making Monuments from Mass Graves in Contemporary Spain: Resistance through Remembrance“, and a conversation with the author Daniel Palacios González, Ph.D. (UNED Barcelona), led by Sanja Horvatinčić, Ph.D. (Institute for Art History Zagreb), will be held at the Association of Croatian Architects in Zagreb.

This is the first public presentation of the English edition of the book published by Amsterdam University Press in 2024. The Spanish original De fosas comunes a lugares de memoria (CEPC, 2022) won the 2023 Memory Studies Association First Book Award.

The book narrates how, beginning in 1936, bodies buried in mass graves during the Spanish War and subsequent dictatorship were turned into monuments. The book describes how the production of monuments evolved and what forms this process and these monuments took; it examines how the monuments were incorporated into society and used to influence public opinion; and it argues that this process was not simply based on the formal logic of tradition but instead reflected a conscious plan with a specific and rational end goal. As such, this book puts forward the idea that the monument as a material object became an expression of the historical consciousness of its producers, relating how different actors communicated their memories into meaningful gestures while limited by the material reality of integrating the bodies into a novel artefact. Finally, it contends that the people creating these monuments did not just bury their dead according to a funerary tradition but also sought to influence society.

Daniel Palacios González is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the UNED, and previously, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. He got his PhD at the Universität zu Köln as an MSCA Fellow and is a member of the research project NECROPOL at the Universitat de Barcelona.

The presentation will take place at the Association of Croatian Architects, Trg bana Jelačića 3/1, on September 23, 2024, starting at 6:00 p.m. The conversation will be in English.

The event is part of the multi-day program of the international seminar entitled „Tracemaking Border Deaths between Erasure and Co-Memoration“, which is held from September 20 to 23 at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore in Zagreb. More about the program here.

This program is funded by COST Action TRACTS – Traces as Research Agenda for Climate Change, Technology Studies, and Social Justice. This work was made as a part of the research project of the Institute of Art History in Zagreb DIGitART – Digital network, spatial and (con)textual analysis of artistic phenomena and heritage of the 20th century and the research project of the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb Poetics and Politics of Ethnography Today, both funded by European Union – NextGenerationEU.

-
Contact:
Sanja Horvatinčić

#DIGitART