Article
“The struggle not to repeat the past is the struggle to have a past.”
-Adam Phillips
In 1938, in a dusty village outside Madrid, Héctor’s great-grandfather was murdered by Francoist troops. He was an illiterate peasant who had never been involved in politics, yet someone denounced him as a Communist and he was pulled out of bed one night and shot against a wall. This violence and other acts like it was erased by a Crónicas TV show, propaganda produced by the Franco regime in the same village.
The project draws a line between the silence surrounding this death and the saccharine, rural utopia depicted in the Crónicas TV show, pitting falsified memories against buried historical facts. The link is Héctor’s father, who became an extra in the show’s three seasons.
The project aims to erode the silence and open up an intergenerational conversation about the past, about the unstable quality of history and memory. The project will be part performance lecture, part seance, and part re-enactment of the TV show. It will explore the perils of nostalgia and the role of memory in healing and reconciliation processes. On another level, Héctor will also explore the implications of “acting,” both in a theatrical and a political sense.
Updated April 2024
