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Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Undoing and redoing Cuelgamuros: Confronting necrotoxicity in the Francoist underworld
Francisco Ferrándiz, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
In this talk, I will critically discuss recent developments in the ‘undoing’ and ‘redoing’ of the Valley of Cuelgamuros (formerly known as Valley of the Fallen or Valle de los Caídos), the most conspicuous and astonishingly unresolved Francoist monument in Spain. It is based on a 20-year-long multisite ethnography covering numerous mass grave exhumations containing Republican civilians executed during and after the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), as well as on following the unfolding afterlives of the exhumed corpses in forensic laboratories, in the media, in ‘dignifying’ political rituals, reburials, DNA sample-taking rituals, demonstrations, book presentations, academic conferences and debates, social networks, and art exhibitions. In time, my research project branched out to incorporate the analysis of the memorial conflicts emerging around the Valley of Cuelgamuros.
The Valley is the most important Francoist memorial, built to commemorate Franco’s victory in the Civil War. It was not an easy project. It took the dictatorial regime almost twenty years to complete, and required a major economic, political, religious and symbolic investment. For sixteen years after its inauguration in 1959, the funerary arrangement in the Valley, key to its overall meaning and memorial power, was presided over by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of Spain’s Mussolini-influenced fascist party, Falange. In 1975, Francisco Franco was buried in a symmetrical position on the other side of the main altar. The Valley became the major memorial site for Spanish fascists, in the guise of a “reconciliatory memorial.”
Surrounding these two politically charged corpses, the monument has a huge underground necropolis hosting almost 34,000 Civil War bodies brought from all over the country between 1959 and 1983. Indeed, in funerary terms, the Valley continued to be “in the making” long after Franco’s death. The provenance of these corpses is very diverse: individual bodies voluntarily sent by relatives who believed in the memorial project, full military cemeteries transferred when voluntary transports started to dwindle, victims of religious prosecution and, most controversially, an unknown number of kidnapped Republican mass graves.
After a brief introduction to the complex making of the monument and its multiple frictions with emergent memory cultures in twenty-first-century Spain, my talk focuses on the tortuous ‘undoing’ of its necropolitical layout. This funerary unmaking is part of a refashioning of the monument in the context of what in Spain is currently called “democratic memory.” As an anthropologist specialized in memory politics in Spain, I have been heavily involved in the always too slow process of undoing and redoing the monument. Within the ethnographic framework outlined above, I was able to develop an ethnography of power where I simultaneously became a transformative agent. In 2011, I was a member of a governmental ‘expert commission’, appointed to resignify the monument, including disassembling its most controversial necropolitical aspects. The key recommendation was the need to ‘undo’ Franco’s burial in the monument. In the period 2020-2023, I served as a senior advisor to the government on memory politics. In this position, my main task was to provide ideas to adapt the monument to a “democratic memory” framework. I also became part of a highly specialised forensic team in charge of exhuming a number of bodies buried in its crypts.
Major feats have already been achieved: Francisco Franco was exhumed in 2019 – causing considerable commotion – and Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera – more discreetly – in 2023. In June 2023, after a convoluted judicial, political and technical process, and amidst accusations of necrophilia and profanation, an exhumation started in the crypts to search for 160 bodies claimed by relatives, exposing all the contradictions and shadows still lingering in the monument. In the process, the increasingly toxic monument became first and foremost necrotoxic.
Bio
Francisco Ferrándiz is Senior Researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). He has a Ph.D. in social and cultural anthropology from UC Berkeley (1996). His research focuses on the anthropology of the body, violence and social memory. Since 2002, he has conducted research on the politics of memory in contemporary Spain, analyzing the exhumations of mass graves from the Civil War (1936‒1939). He is presently Principal Investigator (PI) of the research project The Politics of Memory Exhumations in Contemporary Spain (http://www.politicasdelamemoria.org/en/), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. His main books on this topic are El pasado bajo tierra: Exhumaciones contemporáneas de la Guerra Civil (Anthropos 2014), and, as edited volumes, Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press 2015, with A.C.G.M Robben) and Memory Worlds: Reframing Time and the Past (special issue Memory Studies, 2020, with M. Hristova and J. Vollmeyer). He is currently working on a book on the memory process in 21st Century Spain, and on another more specific on the controversies around the Valley of the Fallen, both based on his twenty year-long ethnographic research.
Based in Barcelona, Joan Bestard Camps has been an active presence in European anthropology ever since the days of EASA’s foundation. Aside from his dedication to our association, he has made significant contributions to a number of central debates that cut across our discipline: on kinship and family, on household and personhood, on assisted reproduction and reproductive health, on art and anthropology, on nationalism and European integration, among others. This session aims to provide an overview of his lifetime contribution to European anthropology.
João Pina-Cabral (Org.) - Research Professor, Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon (Portugal) and Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Kent (UK). The Iberian Casa: Life, History, and Art
Roger Sansi - Senior Lecturer, University of Barcelona (Spain). Joan Bestard and art
Stephan Palmié - Norman and Edna Freehling Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago (USA). Joan, Me, and
the Ghost of Fernando Ortiz
Gemma Orobitg Canal - Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Barcelona (Spain). Working through paradoxes: learning from Joan Bestard
Carles Salazar Carrasco - Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Lleida. Ethnography, kinship, religion and beyond: the social anthropology of Joan Bestard
Maitane Ostalaza Porqueres - Professor of Spanish Contemporary History, (U. Perpignan, France). Family, Nation and Modernity: Joan Bestard and Enric Porqueres, cross dialogues
Gerard Horta Calleja - Senior Lecturer, University of Barcelona (Spain). Joan Bestard: in the beginning was life
Jeanette Edwards - Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester (UK). ‘What’s in a
relative?’: lots
Guillermo Martín-Sáiz - Lecturer, Durham University. Joan and the Theory of Practice
Ramon Sarró (in absentia) - Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford (UK). Only connect – Through Joan Bestard, for example
Joan Bestard Camps - Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Barcelona (Spain). A brief response
A night of creative anthropological performance and experimentation. Please register in advance as audience numbers are limited.
