IP30.2 / 2023

Memory of Disappearance: Dwelling in Oblivion
Carved Stone Markers of the Coordinates of the Graves: 7, 10, 4, and 8 at the General Cemetery of Valencia
Valencia History Museum, CC de l’Alcúdia, MEIAC of Badajoz.

These are the places where bodies of victims of Francoist prisons are documented to be located. The mass graves dwell in a double exile: outside the official narrative and on the urban margins. Only the numbers and letters of the plots allow for their identification. In this piece, cleaning and documenting the markers becomes an act of resistance: rescuing the presence of the absent, pointing out the geography of oblivion, and reinhabiting the silenced pain.
As Antonio Méndez Rubio points out, disappearance is not only a political fact but a symbolic operation that affects the very capacity to narrate¹⁶. Making the place visible is a way to reclaim what was intended to be erased.

16. Antonio Méndez Rubio, Memory of Disappearance: Notes on Poetry and Power, 2006.