The places where nothing happened

Abstract

The Francoist violence and repression through the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Francoist dictatorship (1939-1975) have left many voids that all add up to an unbalanced narrative between the victorious on Franco’s side and the defeated republicans. This is a narrative that builds on the material voids created in the places where presumably ‘nothing happened’ during the civil war and the dictatorship. Through concepts of transgression, like non-absence, ghosts and the abject, I explore the materiality and the material memory left at two sites in particular: the House of Horrors in Arévalo, and Little Russia in Belchite. It is a narrative about how absence and silence materialize as structures of violence and instruments of repression. I argue that to approach these materializations, a broader understanding of the archaeological assemblage and what is accepted conventionally as archaeological knowledge is needed.