Contemporary art and archaeology of disaster in the mass graves of the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

The object of this study is a selection of contemporary projects produced by visual artists who were involved in the processes of exhumation of victims of the Spanish Civil War. The aim is to initiate a line of research based in a type of artistic practices that, although it is not significant in number, began to be outlined as a chapter within the current Spanish art. The main results refer to temporal, spatial and formal characteristics. The emergence of these works, which are documented in situ by the post-memory generations, take place at the beginning of the 21st century, after a long period of muted democratic transition. From a spatial point of view, the artist works at the foot of the grave hand by hand with different organizations, groups and professionals from different fields of knowledge. Thirdly, these projects are materialized in cultural spaces in the form of publications and installations whose narrations are far from the memorial. The relevance of the study lies in the contribution of the artist in the construction of history from the accumulation of collective memories in specific places in which a series of traumatic events occurred, in both literal and metaphorical senses, under a hegemonic historiography.