Spanish Civil War Memory Project
About this collection
- Extent
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111 digital objects.
- Description
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The digital Archive of the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist Dictatorship is an initiative of UC San Diego in collaboration with several Spanish civic associations, such as the ARMH (Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica), the Asociación de Ex-presos y Represaliados Políticos, the Federación Estatal de Foros por la Memoria and others. The Spanish Civil War Memory Project was created and developed by Luis Martin-Cabrera, professor in UC San Diego’s Department of Literature, and it has become a vital component of the UC San Diego Library’s famed Southworth Spanish Civil War Collection, In 2008-2010, with the assistance of these human rights organizations, several teams of UC San Diego graduate students recorded audiovisual testimonies of militants, witnesses, and victims of the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist repression.
The objectives of the Archive are:
· Create a safe institutional space in order to validate the experiences of those who survived the violence implemented by the Fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship.
· Create and preserve an oral record of significant events pertaining to the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist repression. The oral stories of these victims are an alternative mode of historical knowledge.
· Record and preserve the audiovisual dimension of these historical testimonies. The audiovisual component of the archive is essential, because it shows the non-verbal dimension of a traumatic testimony. By filming the testimonies we have access to body language, silences, pauses, and other non-verbal elements. These elements provide important information about the affective dimension of the testimony. Furthermore, the images of the testimony show the process of memory in the making, as an open process rather than as a closed product.
· Make the stories of the victims of the Spanish Civil War and Francoist repression available on the Internet.
The interviews included in the Archive are based on a protocol that tries to empower the witnesses by listening emphatically and actively. This implies that the interviews are open-ended and that the interviewers are historically informed so that they can assist the interviewees in the process of reconstructing their memories. For this reason, the testimonies are minimally edited to “clean” external interruptions, noises, and other irrelevant footage. In sum, we understand the recording of testimonies as a “story telling” process that, as such, involves pauses, repetitions, and a non-linear approach to history.
Additional interviews with survivors and victims of repression of the Spanish Civil War may be added to this site in the future, as well as translations and transcriptions of the interviews. - Creation Date
- between 2008 and 2010
- Sponsors
- Geographics
Format
View formats within this collection
- Language
- Spanish
- Related Resource
Online exhibit
