The etymology of recordar, Spanish for “to remember”, is “to go back to one’s heart”, as memory was once thought to reside there and, even today, processes of memory making are immersed within affective landscapes.
Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen), the Francoist monument built between 1940 and 1959 close to Madrid, will soon be emptied of Franco’s remains.
As it risks becoming a cenotaph – an empty burial monument – and it is at the center of heated public discourses surrounding its future, Valle de los Caídos is paradigmatic of the difficult processes of re-signifying controversial monuments.
Newsletter September 2018 @ Hybrid Space Lab, Berlin 15 September 2018