In recent months, there have been reports of some communities’ interest in repealing various regional laws on Democratic Memory. The erasure of memory in the name of individual freedom is a sinister operation. Even today, it is estimated that there are 140,000 people missing from the Civil War and Francoism, many of whom are in the 4,265 mass graves. In Catalonia, there are more than 900, and it is estimated that only 10% have been opened. The dictatorship marginalized the memory of its Republican adversaries and left these dead in the relative peace of a pain that was thought to disappear if silenced. As the last witnesses of the Spanish Civil War and the immediate post-war period pass away, the wound and its pain have not only not disappeared but remain more alive than ever.

This exhibition includes two pieces based on democratic reparation. On one hand, cabosanroque with “22 holes to make a requiem” focuses on the convoy of 1959 that transported 179 bodies found in the province of Girona to the Valley of the Fallen. It is a secular requiem mass that visualizes and gives a sonic body to the fading away of these bodies and their respective names buried in mass graves in the region. Miquel Garcia, with “Exhumation no.2,” presents a list of more than 5,000 people buried in mass graves in Catalonia, revealed through the procedure of thermosensitive black paint.

Both works are preceded by a research process that demonstrates the complexity of memory: names that do not appear, locations that cannot be found, fluctuating body counts, families unable to perform necessary mourning… Many layers of time, archives, soil, fears, and disputes must be traversed. Everything speaks in different tongues and silences. Memory demands a policy committed to the culture of remembrance.