The Center del Carme Cultura Contemporània (CCCC) inaugurated the Paterna exhibition yesterday. Memory of horror. Women, guardians of memory, an exhibition on the exhumations of the 'Wall of Spain' signed by the photographer Eva Máñez.
Available at the Valencian museum until June 11, it brings together the documentation of the photojournalist on the exhumations of the mass graves in the Paterna cemetery, together with the testimonies of the widows or descendants of the victims of Francoism, who, after More than 80 years old, they still keep the flame of memory alive and seek justice despite the passage of time.
The director of the Consortium of Museums of the Valencian Community (CMCV) and the CCCC, José Luis Pérez Pont, presented the exhibition yesterday with the participation of three of the women 'guardians of memory': Encarna Tarín, Cruz Alemany and Lourdes Ripoll; and Juan Salazar, of the Democratic Memory Classroom.
In it, Pérez Pont pointed out that “culture is never alien to social realities, it is fertile ground for sharing analysis, reflection and denunciation of situations of injustice and inequality. This exhibition brings us closer to pain and the search for missing relatives, also providing a gender perspective.
“We are faced with a material that makes up the living memory of several generations of women, 'the guardians of memory', offering a gender perspective on democratic memory. In this way, they serve as an interaction and dialogue between individual memory and collective memory", defined Eva Máñez.
"All of them exercise a kind of vicarious memory, through which the memory of their grandfather or grandmother passes into their consciousness and is no longer just their ancestor's, but also becomes theirs. Daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters of those shot and disappeared from different places in the Valencian Community and Spain that found a bullet and the common grave in Paterna. Stories of silence and search that now demand truth, justice and reparation", added the artist.
The exhibition is divided into two parts. The first is made up of 15 photographs, taken in the Paterna cemetery since 2016, which accompany and recount the exhumation process of the Franco regime graves. The second brings together 60 portraits and 60 testimonies that show the struggle of the women descendants of those shot as heirs to memory.
With more than a hundred mass graves and the remains of 2,238 shots from the Franco regime, Paterna is considered the 'great mass grave' and the symbol of historical memory in Spain. It is the first place where there is evidence of a firing squad after the Civil War (on April 3, 1939) and the second with the most people shot in the postwar period. There are around 135 mass graves where the remains of the victims of Franco's repression were deposited after being executed in the Terrer, located about 500 meters from the cemetery.
