A mal tiempo, buena cara/In bad weather, a good face

Dates

2019 - Ongoing
Author

Bebe Blanco Agterberg
Topics Social Issues, Contemporary Issues, Documentary

This is a photographic work focussing through the reconstruction and visualisation of memories/remnants on the ‘Pact of Forgetting’ (1977), an imposition created in the transition period in Spain.

How to live in a state built upon silence?

This is a photographic work based on a true story. It is a constructed story that includes images about how memories intertwine with reality and how they have a lasting impact on daily life.

The project is a reflection on the transition period in Spain that followed after the dictator Francisco Franco peacefully passed away in 1975. Spain needed to decide how to move from a dictatorship to a democracy. It wasn’t possible to have a clean break – a clear “problematic” before & “fixed” after. Some of the practices continued and still lay deep within the foundation on which Spain is built today.

One critical tool that was created in order to forget was the “Pact of Forgetting” (Pacto del Olvido) in 1977. The pact was an imposition that existed in different spheres. No one was held accountable for crimes they committed, facts were altered, new stories were presented by the government, and people slowly started to fill in the gaps of their memories with new information. Nothing was certain anymore and the pact became an assumed ‘historical truth”.

The project looks more widely through the reconstruction of memory how society can cope with atrocity. The work is there for a combination between the fabricated and the more documentary image and investigates how forgetting became a political tool.

In times of crisis which face should we trust?

© Bebe Blanco Agterberg - Empty grave at Cementerio de la Almudena, Madrid 2020.

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Empty grave at Cementerio de la Almudena, Madrid 2020.

© Bebe Blanco Agterberg - Image from the A mal tiempo, buena cara/In bad weather, a good face photography project

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Constructed image of a memory. The Almontese preparing to carry the Virgin of El Rocío out into the village streets of El Rocio in Almonte, Spain. Rocío has passed into history as the first film to be banned by the law in the Spanish state after the abolition of cinema censorship in 1977. Directed by Fernando Ruiz Vergara, the film premiered in 1980 but was subsequently interdicted, and remains censured until today in accordance with the sentence passed by the Supreme Court in 1984, which condemned its author for a legal offense of libel against an individual who according to the film was the leader of the brutal repression that took place in the village of Almonte, the cradle of the Romería of El Rocío, during the military coup of 1936

© Bebe Blanco Agterberg - Coins preserved in a tree, Madrid 2020

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Coins preserved in a tree, Madrid 2020

© Bebe Blanco Agterberg - Young men looking over the city. 2019

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Young men looking over the city. 2019

© Bebe Blanco Agterberg - Image from the A mal tiempo, buena cara/In bad weather, a good face photography project

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Constructed image based on a true story. The hiding of the bust of Pablo Iglesias Posse (Founder of the Spanish Socialist Workers Part PSOE). After three years of fighting, the Civil War was coming to an end in Spain, with Madrid in the hands of the dictator Franco. Eager to erase any monuments of the opposition, Nationalist troops gathered leftover dynamite and attempted to blow the bust apart. They failed. After numerous failed attempts they decided to do it by hand. Two man stole the sculpture in the night and buried the bust in the park. It played under the ground for 40 years until 1079 when they dug it up.

© Bebe Blanco Agterberg - Audience in the street after a re-enactment of a historical event. August 2019.

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Audience in the street after a re-enactment of a historical event. August 2019.

© Bebe Blanco Agterberg - Image from the A mal tiempo, buena cara/In bad weather, a good face photography project

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Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen) 1/2. Dictator Francisco Franco claimed that the monument was meant to be a "national act of atonement" and reconciliation. It served as the burial place of Franco's remains from his death in November 1975 until his exhumation on 24 October 2019, as a result of efforts to remove all public veneration of his dictatorship, and following a long legal process. He was buried on top of many of his own victims.

© Bebe Blanco Agterberg - Image from the A mal tiempo, buena cara/In bad weather, a good face photography project

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Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen) 2/2. Visitors walking around the fascist monument where until last October 2019 Franco was buried.

© Bebe Blanco Agterberg - Security camera on the Faro de Moncloa an observation tower in front of Arco de la Victoria, Madrid.

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Security camera on the Faro de Moncloa an observation tower in front of Arco de la Victoria, Madrid.

© Bebe Blanco Agterberg - Man looking down on a relic

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Man looking down on a relic

© Bebe Blanco Agterberg - Image from the A mal tiempo, buena cara/In bad weather, a good face photography project

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Alex is one of the skaters who skates in front of Arco de la Victoria. The 49high arch was constructed at the behest of Francisco Franco to commemorate the victory of Francoist troops in 1936. Now a days the monument is neglected, however they also don't remove it. Alex and his friends take tiles from the monument and build new skate ramps out of them. “We used parts of the monument to make new skate ramps. Nobody takes care of this thing, people just drink in front of it”

© Bebe Blanco Agterberg - Classroom in the National Library in Madrid 2020

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Classroom in the National Library in Madrid 2020

© Bebe Blanco Agterberg - Image from the A mal tiempo, buena cara/In bad weather, a good face photography project

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Calle Peironcely 10 in Madrid became a symbol of the Spanish Civil War, thanks to an iconic image of the shrapnel-pocked house taken by war photographer Robert Capa. After the war, the building at Peironcely 10 remained semi-ruined and abandoned for almost a decade, and then was divided into 15 flats that housed families in poor, overcrowded conditions. The shrapnel holes on the facade were plastered over.

© Bebe Blanco Agterberg - Image from the A mal tiempo, buena cara/In bad weather, a good face photography project

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Communist deputies Santiago Carrillo, Gregorio López Raimundo and Dolores Ibarruri applaud the entry of Juan Carlos I at the opening of the Constituent Legislature.

© Bebe Blanco Agterberg - Hidden Closet.

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Hidden Closet.

© Bebe Blanco Agterberg - Man looking for answers about what has been hidden by the Pact of Oblivion.

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Man looking for answers about what has been hidden by the Pact of Oblivion.

© Bebe Blanco Agterberg - Men re-enacting historic events.

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Men re-enacting historic events.

© Bebe Blanco Agterberg - Image from the A mal tiempo, buena cara/In bad weather, a good face photography project

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Television blocked for it's audience. Presented in a cultural space where they used historic elements in the design of the building.

© Bebe Blanco Agterberg - Image from the A mal tiempo, buena cara/In bad weather, a good face photography project

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Constructed images based upon a memory. Two brothers starting to search for answers what happened to their father who disappeared in the time of Franco's regime.