| Description: | In this arpillera, Sant Roc arpilleristas draw us back to the turbulent era of the Spanish civil war and its aftermath. In this three-year period (1936-1939), an estimated 500,000 people lost their lives. When Barcelona, then the entire Catalonia region and finally Madrid fell to Nationalist troops – bringing the war to a close in March 1939 - up to 500,000 Republican supporters fled across the border into refugee camps in France.
For these arpilleristas, it is the aftermath of the war that finds expression through their conversation, their needles, their threads, their hands. As they tap into their memories, they take us deep into the earth. With sombre hues of cloth they bring us face to face with the “reality of the dead in the ditches during the civil war and, above all, in the postwar period”.
We are confronted with: “the anguish, the disappointment, the rage of those who seek; of those who know where their dead are and cannot take them out to give them the burial they deserve”.
Similar to the families of the disappeared in other jurisdictions, their questions, their requests for documents, their insistence on the truth is met with: “closed doors, unanswered questions”. And yet, with energy and hope, refusing to be silenced, they perist: “they seek their own or others' dead”.
The Spanish Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH) / Association for the Historical Memory Recovery estimates that there are 113,000 people who are still in unidentified mass graves. Through this arpillera we are reminded that each of these 113,000 were part of families and communities and “are much more than bones in the grave”. For these people whose lives were violently cut short, whose future was stolen, the arpilleristas seek truth and justice; they demand to ”rewrite history and make visible those who were buried underground”.
Cunetes, Fundació Ateneu Sant Roc 2022 |
