San Sebastián,
Mabel Tapia and Mira Bernabéu have convened in San Telmo Museuma at twenty Spanish and Latin American artists of different generations to reflect on the role played by certain technologies, not necessarily recent, in the fulfillment of the social control objectives of the regimes of the regimes Totalitarian and, ultimately, to invite the public to verify how creation can become a test of past traumas, sometimes Visiting experiences and in others favoring the correction of pain through the exhibition of their fingerprints, whether these materials or not.
A good part of the projects gathered have to do with Franco and with concrete known situations, given that Spanish origin of many of the authors represented, but the exhibition wants to refer to the mechanisms of dictatorial domination as a whole, hence they have collected creations of other contexts, others that have nothing to do with submission but with the forms of resistance to it and also documentary material that files link with the pieces in an aesthetic or merely political sense.
“Memory forests”, which this collective has been titled, has works by Taxio Ardanaz, Jone Loizaga, María Rosa Aránega, Clemente Bernad, Alán Carrasco, María Amparo Gomar Vidal, Patricia Gómez and María Jesús González, Iñaki Gracenea, Miriam Isasi, Concha Jerez, Anna López-Luna, Amaia Molinet, Ana Teresa Ortega, Juan Pérez, Cristina Piffer, Paloma Polo, Pere Portabella, Txuspo Poyo, Paula Valero and Hugo Vidal, and with the contribution of three files: that of Benedictines of Lazkano, each Chilean and the Tucumán Archive file. The pieces have been provided by their own creators, who have sometimes produced them specifically for this exhibition, they must already add several photolibros from the Gabriela Cendoya collection that San Telmo custody.
Attending to Mabel Tapia and Mira Bernabéu (the latter has hosted in its 1st gallery various projects linked to the past and the memory by some of the artists present here), those technologies at the service of submission are common to any dictatorial regime, for being Inherent to them, and operate at least three dimensions to mold the society to which they are directed and perpetuated; These strata respond compiled works.
The first of these dimensions would have to do with the extension of forms of complicity or tolerance towards the system -Métodos soft– Accompanying forms of repression, punishment and death; The former would suppose a mental coercion; The latter, a usually physical. In order for the totalitarian regime to consolidate in the different layers of a society, it operates a precise and repeated collection engineering between one and the other autocracies in which the discipline and silence of those who want to avoid severe corrective are vital. The dissent evaporates, in this way, before it comes to occur, and in case it is not so, it is destroyed later; Another of the mechanisms to achieve this would be the promotion of individualism, the dissolution of collective meeting spaces or community activities where potentially political impressions are shared.
A second stratum, closer to the official sphere, refers to the control exercised by the state structures themselves through courts and prisons, but also of other instances through which it cannot be avoided, such as schools, churches, asylums or psychiatric hospitals . To them we should add other devices, specific repression facilities of this type of regimes and aimed at those who did not fold from a political, racial, religious point of view …; We refer to forced or slave labor fields, concentration and extermination fields, common walls and graves or police and military barracks.
A third dimension refers to the deployment and mobilization of symbolic forms that row in favor of uniformity in a somewhat subtle sense, such as the creation of commemorative monuments of certain deeds or characters or the adoption of cultural manifestations aimed at transmitting consensus, acceptance or Social tolerance towards the regime, when not to celebrate it.
Both control mechanisms occur at the same time to enhance their effects, and these do not usually end with the dictatorship itself, but remain in force in some following generations. Once pointed out, the end of this exhibition is to raise how art can reflect on them, reveal those footprints and the ways of assuming them, influencing the stories that we give ourselves and how they usually remain for a long time in dispute .
“Memory forests”
San Telmo Museoa
Zuloaga Square, 1
San Sebastián
From February 22 to May 11, 2025
