'Representing Silence': Memory of Francoism in a Photography Exhibition in Buenos Aires

Spanish photographer Nicolás Combarro presented the exhibition Representing Silence in Buenos Aires, a series of images of concentration camps that existed in Spain and France in the 1930s and 1940s and which aims to "learn from the past."

Combarro was born in 1979 in A Coruña, during the transition to democracy after nearly 40 years of Franco's dictatorship. During this political transition, the artist stated in an interview in Buenos Aires, the country generated a "forced amnesia."

" There was an attempt to forget the past in order to build a new future , in a somewhat utopian way, without judging or reviewing what happened during those 40 years of extreme repression and violence. My generation, in a way, rejects forgetting, and we want to know, we want to understand what that wound is," Combarro said.

The exhibition will be on display until June 8 at the Muntref-Center for Contemporary Art , located in the former Hotel de Inmigrantes in Buenos Aires , the place where migrants from all over the world arrived in Argentina.

The exhibition, presented in collaboration with the Spanish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires , portrays some of the Spanish concentration camps that are estimated to have held more than 700,000 prisoners during the Franco regime.

Combarro also decided to focus on the internment camps built in France , a country that was supposed to be a welcoming country but which, under the 1938 law on "undesirable" foreigners , ended up locking up nearly half a million Spaniards fleeing the Franco dictatorship.

"It seemed logical to me to make that comparison between how Republicans were treated in Spain and France , which at one point we thought of as an ally and which ended up being part of the repression," explained the artist, who also highlighted Argentina's warm reception of Spanish immigration.

The photographer emphasized that "the reception in Argentina ended up being completely different from that in France" and found it very significant that the exhibition is being held at the Immigration Museum, which was visited by so many Spaniards fleeing the Spanish Civil War.

In this regard, the Spanish ambassador to Argentina, Joaquín María de Arístegui Laborde, who was present at the opening of the exhibition, expressed that "there could not be a better place to present this magnificent collection of photographs than this center (...) to which Spain and the Spanish owe so much."

The ambassador also emphasized the importance of "keeping the memory alive forever, the memory of where we come from, of what happened to us, of the efforts our families made."

The exhibition "Representing Silence" was presented in its entirety for the first time late last year in the Argentine city of Rosario and is now being presented for the first time in Buenos Aires. After having previously shown some chapters in Germany, France, Portugal, and Colombia, and only on a few occasions in Spain, it has been shown for the first time in Buenos Aires.

The artist attributed this to the controversy that, he said , attempts to commemorate the crimes of Franco's regime still generate in some parts of Spain and, on the other hand, to the fact that it is "a phenomenon that surprises countries that have faced their own violence, but were unaware that similar systems had been systematically and strategically produced in Spain."

Combarro chose to capture images of the fields at night in order to "remove them from a temporal context" and be able to "imagine what they were like in their origins" , while at the same time, through the illumination of the architectural remains, he sought to "return them to light".

"It's an exhibition that seeks to learn from the past so as not to repeat the same mistakes in the present and in the future," he mentioned, and warned about the current migration phenomenon: "The migrant population, which does not choose its destination but does so out of sheer desperation, and the way in which countries welcome or fail to welcome this migrant population, gives us evidence of our position as a civil society."