Paper short abstract:

Drawing from a long term fieldwork, this paper addresses how the associations and the institutions deal with the spatial inscription of memory, in particular related to the identification, localization and memorialization of unmarked graves of the Spanish Civil War.

Paper long abstract:

From 2001, hundreds of corpses of soldiers killed in the front lines but also of ordinary citizens executed during the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath have been unearthed from unmarked graves all over Spain. Since then, claims for truth, justice and reparation have arisen from bottom up social movements, articulated mostly, but not only, around the exhumation of these unmarked mass graves.

More than 70 years after the beginning of the war, the exhumation proceedings, alongside memory policies were given a legal frame for the first time since the end of the dictatorship. While the Law of Historic Memory did not consider the identification of the bodies an obligation, nor a duty for the State, it ruled a whole set of commemoration and memory practices, such as street renaming, pulling down monuments from the dictatorial era and building of new memorials honouring the victims of the Francoist repression. The opening of mass graves has produced a new geography of remembrance both in the countryside and within the cities as long forgotten and even unknown locations are turned into spaces of memory. Drawing from a long term fieldwork, this paper addresses how the associations and the institutions deal with the spatial inscription of memory, in particular related to the identification, localization and memorialization of unmarked graves as well as the commemoration and mourning rituals.