Contested Histories Onsite: Valle de los Caídos/Valley of the Fallen

The MSA and Euroclio are excited to announce the fourth and final online event in the Contested Histories Onsite Series!

This time we will travel (virtually) to the Valley of the Fallen, in Madrid, Spain. The session will take place on April 20, 16:00-17:30 CEST, and it will tour what is considered by many memory scholars to be Europe’s most controversial monument. To unpack the discourse surrounding this site, the event will feature the following acclaimed speakers:

Dr Marije Hristova, Assistant Professor of Hispanic Cultures and Literature at Radboud University Nijmegen and a researcher in the project NECROPOL (funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation), will offer a virtual lecture. She is a specialist in Spanish memory cultures, transnational memories of the Spanish Civil War and the production of cultural memories after the forensic turn in Spain and in Europe. In her presentation, she understands the Valley of the Fallen within the wider Francoist politics of remembrance. As such, it is part of a constellation of sites and places of memory marked by National Catholicism and its necropolitical culture of martyrdom. In her presentation, she will focus on the meaning of the Valley of the Fallen before 1975, that is, before it became known as ‘Franco’s grave.’

Following this lecture, Dr Francisco Ferrándiz, Tenured Researcher at CSIC and Senior Advisor in the Spanish State Secretariat for Democratic Memory, will give a virtual tour of the site. Since 2002, he has conducted research on the politics of memory in contemporary Spain, analysing the exhumations of mass graves from the Civil War (1936‒1939). He is presently the Principal Investigator (PI) of the research project The Politics of Memory Exhumations in Contemporary Spain, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Based on long-term ethnographic research on contemporary exhumations of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), his presentation explores the controversies taking shape over the Valley of the Fallen, the most conspicuous Francoist monument in contemporary Spain. In the last few years, the Valley has come under close scrutiny and criticism, and an institutional project to significantly re-signify it, including the exhumation of the former dictator from its Basilica in late 2019, is currently underway.

You can register for the event here.

In addition, should you be interested, we would like to invite you to take part in two focus group interviews about the ‘Contested Histories Onsite’ project. The interviews will last about one hour and will consist of one interview before the event, on either April 15, 2-4 pm CEST, or April 19 6-8 pm CEST. During the focus group interviews we will discuss your expectations of the event, what you took away from it, and why you think learning about contested sites is important. The interviews will be conducted by Thomas Van de Putte, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Trento. If you would like to take part in the focus group, please reply to this email for further information.

Contested Histories Onsite aims to help citizens better understand and address complex and diverse legacies of Europe’s 20th Century totalitarian past. Online tours and lectures will be held at contested historical sites across Europe, and a toolkit for educators will be developed that focuses on how to give critical tours that emphasise multiple perspectives, dialogue and civic engagement.

We hope to see you there.

The Onsite Team

Contested Histories Onsite is a joint project between the Memory Studies Association and EuroClio, with the support of the Europe for Citizens programme of the European Union.