Grievability and the Politics of Visibility: The Photography of Francesc Torres and the Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

The internationally known Spanish multimedia artist Francesc Torres has created two interrelated photographic memory projects, a museum installation and the 2007 book of photographs on which the exhibit was based, both titled Oscura es la habitación donde dormimos (Dark Is the Room Where We Sleep). The installation was first shown in the International Center of Photography in New York City between September 2007 and January 2008 and then traveled to Barcelona, Spain, to be shown in a retrospective of Torres’s work, entitled Da Capo, at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) from June through September 2008.¹ Torres’s exhibit and book document the 2004 exhumation in a small Spanish town, Villamayor de los Montes (in the northern province of Burgos), of the mass grave containing the bodies of 46 Republican men and boys killed by right-wing forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. The book presents black and white photographs detailing the entire process of exhuming the mass grave in 2004 as well as color photographs of the 2006 ceremony during which the bodies, after having been identified by a forensic team, were reburied in a collective tomb, or mausoleum, within the confines of the town cemetery.²