Always Franco (Spain Brand). Eugenio Merino

Always Franco (Spain Brand) is a sculpture depicting the dictator Francisco Franco preserved alive inside a refrigerator, dressed in his white uniform as Captain General of the Spanish Navy. Originally conceived in 2012, the piece returns on the 90th anniversary of his 1936 coup d’état which, after failing and refusing to relent, unleashed a terrible war. The date coincides with the 50th anniversary of the dictator’s death and with a broad and diverse debate on the material and immaterial persistence of his legacy.

The work seeks to present preservation as a form of continuity. The refrigerator does not represent the dictator’s death, but rather his preservation, his survival — the place where Spanish democracy after his dictatorship has stored part of its nourishment. It is a precise metaphor symbolizing the impunity of his crimes. The pact of silence during Spain’s Transition was the switch that kept this refrigerator running, allowing the structures of the regime to survive, recycled within democratic institutions, and enabling its elites to remain intact as such throughout the restored democracy.

Always Franco reflects on historical memory and on how the “Spain Brand” — that narrative of colorful modernity, openness, and reconciliation — was built upon the impunity of Francoism’s crimes and the uncorrupted preservation of part of its legacy.

The project includes the participation of Halim Badawi, researcher, critic, and art curator; Matilde Eiroa San Francisco, Professor of History, founder of the 20th Century Historical Memory Chair at the Complutense University of Madrid and member of the Board of Trustees of the Documentary Center of Historical Memory; and Emilio Silva, sociologist, journalist, and president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory.