Memories of stone and steel. Monuments to the victims of the Civil War and Francoism in the Basque Country

The recovery of the history and memory of republican victims of the Civil War has, in the last decade, become a key dynamic in the Basque Autonomous Community. There are many demonstrations of this recovery of memory, driven by several different political bodies, human rights organisations, associations and descendants of victims, but among them all, the numerous monuments erected throughout the whole of the Basque region occupy a prominent position.

Building a monument is the result of a complex and laborious process in which opposing and even conflictive views may emerge of history, memory and the message the monument is intended to convey. Within this framework, this exhibition produced by the Gernika Peace Museum Foundation following the research done by the professor, at the Bordeaux University, Jesús J. Alonso Carballes intends to give an account of precisely this process of memory that begins during the war, to analyse the memory claims of different periods, the range of artistic proposals and aesthetic and sculptural projections, and also to consider the subsequent reception of the monument.

Although the exhibition considers these three dimensions and these three periods of a monument, its central axis is the creation and construction process of monuments, their materialisation and definitive integration into the landscape of a given place and, in cases like the monuments erected during the Francoist period, their subsequent disappearance.

On the basis of a previous exhaustive historical study, the exhibition intends to restore the origins of the monuments, the history and memory of the construction itself from conception to implementation, their development and even their subsequent transformation or disappearance.