art and control at the San Telmo Museum

Forests of memory: art and control at the San Telmo Museum
A collective in San Sebastian examines the mechanisms of control in totalitarian regimes
Mabel Tapia and Mira Bernabéu have invited twenty living Spanish and Latin American artists from different generations to the San Telmo Museum to reflect on the role played by certain technologies, not necessarily recent, in the fulfillment of the objectives of social control typical of totalitarian regimes and, ultimately, to invite the public to see how creation can become a witness and even proof of past traumas, sometimes making experiences visible and at other times favouring the healing of pain through the exhibition of its traces, whether these are material or not.

Many of the projects brought together have to do with Franco's regime and with specific known situations, given the Spanish origin of many of the authors represented, but the exhibition aims to refer to the mechanisms of dictatorial domination as a whole, hence the inclusion of creations from other contexts, others that have nothing to do with submission but with forms of resistance to it, and also documentary material that establishes a link with the pieces in an aesthetic or merely political sense.

“Forests of Memory”, as this collective exhibition is entitled, features works by Taxio Ardanaz, Jone Loizaga, María Rosa Aránega, Clemente Bernad, Alán Carrasco, María Amparo Gomar Vidal, Patricia Gómez and María Jesús González, Iñaki Gracenea, Miriam Isasi, Concha Jerez, Anna López-Luna, Amaia Molinet, Ana Teresa Ortega, Juan Pérez, Cristina Piffer, Paloma Polo, Pere Portabella, Txuspo Poyo, Paula Valero and Hugo Vidal, and with contributions from three archives: the Benedictines of Lazkano, the Chilean C.A.D.A. and the Tucumán Arde Archive. The pieces have been loaned by their own creators, who have sometimes produced them specifically for this exhibition, and to them must be added several photobooks from the Gabriela Cendoya collection held by San Telmo.

According to Mabel Tapia and Mira Bernabéu (the latter has hosted various projects linked to the past and memory in his gallery 1MiraMadrid by some of the artists present here), these technologies at the service of submission are common to any dictatorial regime, because they are inherent to them, and operate in at least three dimensions to succeed in shaping the society to which they are directed and perpetuate themselves; the works compiled respond to these strata.
The first of these dimensions would have to do with the extension of forms of complicity or tolerance towards the system – soft methods – accompanying the forms of repression, punishment and death; the first would come to suppose a mental coercion; the second, a usually physical one. For the totalitarian regime to consolidate itself in the different layers of a society, a precise and repeated engineering of capture operates between one and other autocracies in which the discipline and silence of those who want to avoid the severe corrective are vital. Dissent is thus evaporated before it can occur, and if it does not, it is destroyed afterwards; another mechanism to achieve this would be the promotion of individualism, the dissolution of spaces for collective meetings or community activities where potentially political impressions are shared.

A second stratum, closer to the official sphere, refers to the control exercised by the State structures themselves through courts and prisons, but also other instances through which one cannot avoid passing, such as schools, churches, asylums or psychiatric hospitals. To these should be added other devices, repressive facilities specific to this type of regime and directed at those who do not conform to it from a political, racial, religious point of view...; we are referring to forced or slave labor camps, concentration and extermination camps, walls and mass graves or police and military barracks. A third dimension refers to the deployment and mobilization of symbolic forms that row in favor of uniformity in a somewhat more subtle sense, such as the creation of commemorative monuments of certain deeds or characters or the adoption of cultural manifestations intended to transmit consensus, acceptance or social tolerance towards the regime, if not to celebrate it.

Both control mechanisms occur at the same time to enhance their effects, and these do not usually end with the dictatorship itself, but remain in force in some following generations. Once indicated, the purpose of this exhibition is to raise how art can reflect on them, reveal these traces and the ways of assuming them, influence the stories we give ourselves of these policies and how these usually remain in dispute for a long time.
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