My two-month stay in Spain has been an invaluable research experience. The opportunity to spend time in Madrid and Barcelona, to observe and participate in an exhumation, and to interview forensic scientists, photographers, artists, and archivists about the intersection of science, visual representation, and history has allowed me to gain a more nuanced understanding of how memory can be mobilized to discuss the politics of both the past and the present. The information that I have collected over the past eight weeks will be incredibly useful as I begin to define and design my dissertation research project. Even more so, as I begin think about how forensic science and photographic practices are employed differently across different cultural, political, and historical contexts.
In this last post, I want to address a few topics that have come up in recent interviews as well as some themes that have appeared and reappeared throughout the course of fieldwork. While in Barcelona, I have interviewed several visual artists and members of the academic community who share an interest in the ways in which visual media has been and can be used to call attention to or discuss the period of political violence that marked a large part of Spain’s recent history. In almost all of these interviews, the “papeles de Salamanca” have played an important – if not a primary – role in describing local and national memory debates. The Salamanca papers are a collection of documents that formerly pertained to the Archivo General de la Guerra Civil Española in Salamanca. The Archive itself consists in an immense stockpile of thousands of documents that were produced and/or collected by the Francoist regime. Now deemed to be an “archivo de la represión,” this particular archive is thought to be an invaluable source of information regarding the inner workings of the Franco dictatorship. Continue reading
