Bebe Blanco Agterberg

History is an infinite invention. All societies invent their own past. History is not based on facts but on interpretation of the facts. Historical science is just another literary genre, a hybrid created from objectivity, subjectivity and discourse.

 

‘A mal tiempo buena cara’ [“Try to put a brave face on it”] is a photographic work that asks how it is possible to live in a State built on silence. The project is a meditation on the period of transition in Spain that followed the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. The Spanish people had to decide how to move from dictatorship to democracy without violence, and this made a clean break impossible. Many crimes committed under the dictatorship went unpunished and the State apparatus was recycled with the same leading figures. Some of the practices of the dictatorial regime continued and still form part of the foundations on which Spain is built today.

The project takes a wide-ranging look at all these issues, reconstructing the collective memory in order to confront atrocity. The work seeks to combine the artist’s photographs with more documentary images to look at how oblivion became a political tool.