Searching for Leo Historical memory blog

The project investigates Spain’s collective memory, and tries to relate the past, present and the future. this pilot project will explore methods and strategies for further discussion. A longer term aim is to develp creative approaches which can be used to bring together people with potentially divisive opinions in order to listen to each other, to recognise the other side of a story.

Research around memory, archives and autoethnographic practice impacts on how we think about therelationship between the past and now. This has a wider influence on strategies for health and well-being. Some of the content I am dealing with relates specifically to the traumas of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), as a personal history,but also in relation to the nation state and its ability to process that trauma. The methodologies adopted have a significance which go beyond the immediate reference of the project and might be utilised in other communities and civic groups to address how we experience personal and collective history through the examination and interpretation of archive material.

Taking as a starting point the discovery that my grandfather was a photographer for the Nationalist Propaganda division during the civil war, and my great-uncle fought for the Republicans, the work aims to broaden the understanding of how families and communities come to terms with these tensions in a context where forgetting has been the main impulse. Given the prevalence of absence, gaps and silence in many of these stories, alternate truths have sometimes replaced and reconstructed memories from the past.