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Photography, war and gender: Redefining women’s militancy during and after conflict in Ireland and Spain
Abstract
Bringing together the comparative case studies of revolutionary Ireland (1916-1923) and the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), this thesis provides an innovative social history of militant women’s photographic practices during conflict and in its aftermath. In particular, this study draws on material and feminist approaches to photography as it focuses on women’s roles as producers, editors, and collectors of photography across public and private networks, as it traces the complex lives and afterlives of these photographs as they circulate during and after war. Historicising and rereading militant women’s photography uncovers alternative narratives of war that enrich scholarly knowledge of gender and conflict. This research reveals that militant women used photography to articulate their own militant identities, to legitimise and negotiate their participation during war, and to contest their erasure from public narratives of conflict. Despite facing violent repression, militant women’s photographic practices subverted the institutional attempts to erase them by building counter-narratives of defiant remembrance. This thesis calls on us to recognise these narratives and bring them to the forefront of our understanding of gender and war in Ireland and Spain.
In addition, reconceptualising our approach to militant women’s photographic practices enables us to move beyond linear narratives of forgetting and rediscovery, and interrogate the role of photographic visibility within patriarchal narratives of war. Within contemporary cultural discourses, visibility is framed as a means of recovery for women; however, the case studies in this thesis reveal that this renewed visibility is still formed in negotiation with patriarchal frameworks of war. Within this representation of women’s militancy, active participation is visualised within a masculinist framework that erases those who do not fit within this limited definition. This thesis argues that the alternative gazes on war seen in militant women’s photographic practices hold the potential to disrupt and dismantle patriarchal narratives of war.
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Hasta ahora , la participación de las mujeres en el movimiento estudiantil contra el franquismo no ha sido objeto de análisis. Este hecho puede deberse a los prejuicios de los investigadores sobre el tema ( generalmente hombres), pero también puede estar relacionado con las especiales condiciones del activismo político de las mujeres de ese periódo.Tomando ejemplos del caso valenciano y comenzando con los antecedentes en las organizaciones de izquierdas anteriores y en el sindicato juvenil oficial (SEU), el autor revisa algunos aspectos de la política universitaria femenina en los sindicatos democráticos y en los partidos políticos izquierdistas y concluye que la participación de las mujeres fue cuantitativamente litmitada y a menudo relegada, pero menos e los que las fuentes (incluyendo la memoria de las mujeres) inicialmente sugerían. Además fue decisiva para cambiar el mismo sentido de lo "político" y fue más una buena que una mala experiencia para ulteriores militancias en otros movimientos, como el feminista.
The centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising was celebrated in 2016, the centrepiece of a decade-long programme of national commemoration in the Republic of Ireland. Marked by digitality and widely declared a success for public engagement with history, the centenary also represented a turning point in an ongoing feminist re-appraisal of the Irish Revolution, one that has been reflected back in societal shifts concerning the position and freedoms of Irish women today. Drawing upon the primary author’s doctoral research, this article demonstrates the methods and collaboration involved in collecting historical tweets from the 1916 centenary via the Twitter Premium API and the ways in which Twitter was being appropriated in critical remembrance and through a feminist lens.
Available at: https://journalofdigitalhistory.org/en/article/SLCj9T3MsrEk
The memory of the Paris Commune of 1871 has long been summoned as an example of urban revolutionary struggle. In 2011 a Parisian street art collective, RaspouTeam, produced a series of commemorative installations across Paris to mark the 140th anniversary of the Commune. They intended the project to make an explicit link between the politics of the Paris Commune of 1871, and the politics of public space in the twenty-first century city. 2021 marks the 150th anniversary of the Commune. In the last decade the struggle to halt the encroachment of capital upon community and the demand for democratic public spaces (as called for by the Communards of Paris) have remained at the forefront of urban political projects. As pseudo-public open spaces and corporate-owned urban areas present new battlegrounds for economic and social justice protests in cities across the globe, the anniversary of the Paris Commune offers an opportunity to reflect on how and why we remember radical urban resistance of the past, and to ask whether doing so has the potential to arm us for the struggles of today.
El fotoperiodismo moderno se fraguó en las primeras décadas del siglo XX coincidiendo con el triunfo de las revistas y semanarios ilustrados. Su éxito tuvo lugar tras la I Guerra Mundial, cuando se modificó la función de la prensa, comenzó a valorarse la eficiencia de los fotógrafos profesionales, aparecieron equipos más pequeños y manejables y cambió el modus operandi de los periodistas y el formato de las imágenes. La Guerra Civil española (1936-1939) propició el surgimiento de una narrativa fotográfica que pretendió seducir al espectador, influir en su percepción de la realidad y movilizar su posicionamiento moral e ideológico. Esta evolución se sustentó en avances técnicos y fue protagonizada por profesionales que desplegaron un compromiso ideológico y un alto grado de implicación política. Entre ellos también se encuentran mujeres cuyos nombres han sido omitidos o desplazados en la historia del medio fotográfico. En este contexto, el objetivo de este trabajo es analizar la aportación y la repercusión de Gerda Taro, Kati Horna, Vera Elkan, Agnes Hodgson y otras mujeres fotógrafas que trabajaron en Aragón durante el enfrentamiento bélico y cuyo trabajo supuso un punto de inflexión en la historia del medio. El estudio de sus biografías y la contextualización de sus trayectorias profesionales se ha llevado a cabo mediante la revisión sistemática y el análisis de diferentes fuentes de información bibliográficas, hemerográficas y archivísticas, considerando enfoques disciplinarios complementarios, procedentes de la Historia, los Estudios Culturales y por supuesto, la Documentación. Entre los resultados alcanzados destaca el conocimiento de sus biografías, la contextualización de sus trayectorias profesionales y la caracterización de su obra.
Las fotografías desafían el olvido. Lo sabían muy bien, y así lo demostraron, los fotógrafos republicanos que arriesgaron por partida doble su vida para conseguir y más tarde preservar sus imágenes como testimonio de la Guerra Civil y del exilio español. Durante los casi tres años que duró el conflicto los ojos del mundo se fijaron en España gracias a la gran cobertura que la prensa inter-nacional dedicó al país. El periodismo informativo acababa de dar un giro decisivo hacia la información gráfica, y miles de corresponsales españoles y extranjeros cubrieron el conflicto desde posiciones en absoluto neutrales. La mayoría de ellos testimoniaron esta guerra con pasión y autoridad, convirtiéndose en responsables del primer borrador de una historia marcada por uno de los conflictos decisivos del siglo xx, que no los dejó indiferentes. Porque, más que en meros observadores y cronistas objetivos, los muchos periodistas, escritores y fotógrafos que trabajaron del lado de la España leal se transformaron, como denominó el corresponsal estadounidense Louis Fischer, en
colaboradores activos de la causa» ...
The photographs taken by Antoni Campañà (1906-1989) during the Spanish Civil War were hidden for over eighty years until their discovery in the autumn of 2018. This very important discovery provides a new look at Barcelona in war and revolution, offering complementary and unknown photographic material of events of great historical importance such as the Andalusian “Desbandá” of 1937, the protests over the food shortage or the effects of the national bombings, as well as unpublished portraits of the anarchist militiamen or figures such as Joan García Oliver. Of the more than 5000 unpublished war negatives discovered, in this work we analyze ten photographs that are representative of the author, his style and the period he portrays.
Resumen:El hallazgo en México durante el año 2007 de más de 4.000 negativos inéditos de la Guerra Civil Española pertenecientes a Robert Capa (Endre Ernö Friedmann), David Seymour (David Szymin, “Chim”) y Gerda Taro (Gerda Pohorylle) ha puesto definitivamente en valor el trabajo de esta última, la primera fotoperiodista fallecida en el frente de acción por documentar desde primera línea la guerra de España. El presente trabajo revisa el momento fotográfico de la Guerra Civil Española a partir del trabajo de Gerda Taro a razón del valor y significación de sus fotografías. Para ello, se han estudiado 716 originales de la fotógrafa en diferentes soportes (película negativa de 35 mm y 6x6 cm, copias por contacto, copias de época y modernas), y se han analizado pormenorizadamente algunas de estas fotografías mediante un método que ha permitido obtener conclusiones definitivas sobre el conjunto de su obra. Los resultados apuntan a que la práctica fotográfica de Gerda Taro en la guerra de España contribuyó a la redefinición del concepto de fotoperiodismo en occidente. Abstract: The discovery in Mexico in 2007 of more than 4,000 unpublished negatives from the Spanish Civil War, owned by Robert Capa (Endre Ernö Friedmann), David Seymour (David Szymin, “Chim”) and Gerda Taro (Gerda Pohorylle) has in particular shown the importance of the latters body of work. Taro is considered to be the first photographer to die during a war, whilst working on the front line of the Spanish Civil War. This paper reviews Taro’s photographs that capture this important moment in time, in Taro’s own, unique photojournalistic style. To do this, 716 original photographs were studied across different media, (35 mm negative films, 6x6 cm contact prints and enlargements), some of which have been thoroughly analyzed by a method that has led to precise conclusions about the body of work. The results show that Gerda Taro’s work during the Spanish Civil War contributed to the redefinition of the concept of photojournalism in the West. Palabras clave: Gerda Taro; Robert Capa; Fotoperiodismo; Vanguardias Históricas; Guerra Civil Española; Análisis fotográfico. Keywords: Gerda Taro; Robert Capa; Photojournalism; Historical Vanguards, Spanish Civil War, Analysis photographic.
The 1924–5 fundraising tour in Australia by republican activists, Kathleen Barry and Linda Kearns, although successful, has received little attention from historians, more focused on the controversial tour of Fr Michael O'Flanagan and J. J. O'Kelly the previous year. While O'Flanagan and O'Kelly's tour ended with their deportation, Barry and Kearns successfully navigated the different agendas of Irish-Australian political and social groups to organise speaking engagements and raise considerable funds for the Irish Republican Prisoners’ Dependants' Fund. The women were experienced republican activists, however on their Australian tour they placed themselves firmly in traditional female patriotic roles, as nurturers and supporters of men fighting for Irish freedom. This article analyses their strategic use of gendered expectations to allay suspicions about their political agenda to successfully raise money and negotiate with political and ecclesiastical leaders.
Fashioning Spain is a cultural history of Spanish fashion in the 20th and 21st centuries, a period of significant social, political, and economic upheaval. As Spain moved from dictatorship to democracy and, most recently, to the digital age, fashion has experienced seismic shifts. The chapters in this collection reveal how women empowered themselves through fashion choices, detail Balenciaga’s international stardom, present female photographers challenging gender roles under Franco’s rule, and uncover the politicization of the mantilla. In the visual culture of Spanish fashion, tradition and modernity coexist and compete, reflecting society’s changing affects.
Using a range of case studies and approaches, this collection explores fashion in films, comics from la Movida, Rosalía’s music videos, and both brick-and-mortar and virtual museums. It demonstrates that fashion is ripe with historical meaning, and offers unique insights into the many facets of Spanish cultural life.
This project examines the mythos of famed war photographer Robert Capa and its influence
on the photojournalistic canon. Using Barthes’ concept of ideological myth as a
foundation, the project examines four sets of discourses about Capa: his own selfpromotion,
biographies, exhibition reviews, and photojournalistic textbooks. The analysis
suggests that the Capa myth is characterized by hegemonic masculinity, emphasizing
risk-taking, strength and courage, in ways that may occlude the famed photographer’s
humanity. The corpus chosen for this project enabled an ideological analysis and critique
of the way the Capa myth permeates the field’s indoctrination. The project finds
that the mythic portrait of Capa has had considerable influence on photojournalistic
education but may no longer serve the larger field.
"In The New Woman International , editors Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco have gathered a group of intellectually stimulating and provocative essays that present the emergence, both tentative and triumphant, of this new global icon and her increasingly multicultural image. Written largely by historians of art and film, these essays emphasize visual analysis of the photographic and film media that carried the new woman's influential message."
---Norma Broude, American University
" The New Woman International focuses on the New Woman not simply as an image to be analyzed but also as a producer of images and text. This groundbreaking anthology represents a theoretically sophisticated set of essays that thoroughly examine the phenomenon of the New Woman in previously unexplored ways."
---Sarah E. Chinn, Hunter College, CUNY
Images of flappers, garçonnes , Modern Girls, neue Frauen , and trampky ---all embodiments of the dashing New Woman---symbolized an expanded public role for women from the suffragist era through the dawn of 1960s feminism. Chronicling nearly a century of global challenges to gender norms, The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s is the first book to examine modern femininity's ongoing relationship with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' most influential new media: photography and film. This volume examines the ways in which novel ideas about women's roles in society and politics were disseminated through these technological media, and it probes the significance of radical changes in female fashion, appearance, and sexual identity. Additionally, these original essays explore the manner in which New Women artists used photography and film to respond creatively to gendered stereotypes and to reconceive of ways of being a woman in a rapidly modernizing world.
The New Woman International brings together different generations of scholars and curators who are experts in gender, photography, literature, mass media, and film to analyze the New Woman from her inception in the later nineteenth century through her full development in the interwar period, and the expansion of her forms in subsequent decades. Arranged both chronologically and thematically, these essays show how controversial female ideals figured in discourses including those on gender norms, race, technology, sexuality, female agency, science, media representation, modernism, commercial culture, internationalism, colonialism, and transnational modernity. In exploring these topics through images that range from montages to newspapers' halftone prints to film stills, this book investigates the terms of gendered representation as a process in which women were as much agents as allegories. Inaugurating a new chapter in the scholarship of representation and New Womanhood and spanning North America, Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, and the colonial contexts of Africa and the Pacific, this volume reveals the ways in which a feminine ideal circled the globe to be translated into numerous visual languages.
With a foreword from the eminent feminist art historian Linda Nochlin, this collection includes contributions by Jan Bardsley, Matthew Biro, Gianna Carotenuto, Melody Davis, Kristine Harris, Karla Huebner, Kristen Lubben, Maria Makela, Elizabeth Otto, Martha H. Patterson, Vanessa Rocco, Clare I. Rogan, Despina Stratigakos, Brett M. Van Hoesen, Kathleen M. Vernon, and Lisa Jaye Young.
DIGITALCULTUREBOOKS: a collaborative imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the University of Michigan Library
Between 1914 and 1918, military, press and amateur photographers produced thousands of pictures. Either classified in military archives specially created with this purpose in 1915, collected in personal albums or circulated in illustrated magazines, photographs were supposed to tell the story of the war. Picturing the Western Front argues that photographic practices also shaped combatants and civilians' war experiences. Doing photography (taking pictures, posing for them, exhibiting, cataloguing and looking at them) allowed combatants and civilians to make sense of what they were living through. Photography mattered because it enabled combatants and civilians to record events, establish or reinforce bonds with one another, represent bodies, place people and events in imaginative geographies and making things visible, while making others, such as suicide, invisible. Photographic practices became, thus, frames of experience
La figura de la miliciana y su lucha por el cambio sociopolítico se han recuperado en numerosas producciones narrativas recientes. Mediante el análisis de su representación en La voz dormida (2002) de Dulce Chacón, Inés y la alegría (2011) y Las tres bodas de Manolita (2014) de Almudena Grandes, La monja libertaria (1985) de Antonio Rabinad, y Así fue pasando el tiempo. Memorias de una miliciana extremeña (2006) de María de la Luz Mejías Correa, en este artículo se examina la proyección de la miliciana en el imaginario cultural español contemporáneo y en la memoria histórica del país.
The period from 1912 to 1923 is the most heavily privileged period in modern Irish historiography and it has become commonplace to describe this period as “The Irish Revolution.” Moreover, a number of Irish historians have built on this to see the post-1922 period as the “Irish Counter-Revolution,” when more radical political impulses were suppressed in favour of the Free State’s vision of conservative law and order. This paper challenges these paradigms by arguing that the themes commonly associated with the “Revolution” – meritocracy, violence, the excitement about acquiring national power – had currency within Irish nationalism long before 1912. Similarly, the defining features of the “Counter-Revolution” – coercion, fear of socialism and feminism, a desire to force Irish citizens to live up to certain prescribed social roles – were already implicit in the politics and culture of the “Revolution.” Viewing Irish nationalism through the lens of masculinity shows how there was much continuity here: the Irish nationalist project of creating politically reliable, implicitly male citizens can be traced from the period of the cultural revival, through the “Revolution” and into the post-1922 “Counter-Revolution.” Moreover, “Masculinity” was a key means of supressing more radical political currents in the years after 1916.
At the outset of the Spanish Civil War, Ireland’s ruling party were faced with the challenge of maintaining political hegemony. Revealing the old fault lines of the Irish Civil War, the opposition cast the government’s Non-intervention policy as pro-Communist and anti-Catholic; a refusal to support Spanish insurgents in what was perceived by the majority as their defence of the Catholic faith. Following McNally, this paper utilises Gramsci’s theory of hegemony to explore political equilibrium in the contexts of the Irish and Spanish conflicts. The notion of the “organic intellectual” enables a Gramscian reading of war photography, finding common visual language in the works of Robert Capa and W.D. Hogan as they contributed to national and transnational projects of hegemony. Through such a reading, the author finds cultural compatibility between the conflicts and casts the Irish revolutionary period in new international light.
Protestors across the world use aesthetics in order to communicate their ideas and ensure their voices are heard. This book looks at protest aesthetics, which we consider to be the visual and performative elements of protest, such as images, symbols, graffiti, art, as well as the choreography of protest actions in public spaces. Through the use of social media, protestors have been able to create an alternative space for people to engage with politics that is more inclusive and participatory than traditional politics. This volume focuses on the role of visual culture in a highly mediated environment and draws on case studies from Europe, Thailand, South Africa, USA, Argentina, and the Middle East in order to demonstrate how protestors use aesthetics to communicate their demands and ideas. It examines how digital media is harnessed by protestors and argues that all protest aesthetics are performative and communicative.
Although Swiss humanitarian organizations are meant to operate in strict compliance with the principle of neutrality, the Swiss Aid to Spanish Children organization, or Ayuda Suiza, centered the scope of its relief operations on Republican Spain during the Civil War. By analyzing the correspondence and photographic albums of one of its female collaborators, Elisabeth Eidenbenz, this article seeks to explain Ayuda Suiza's sympathies for the democratic cause as the result of the creation of a community of feeling according to which individual agents shaped their experiences through the mobilization of emotional practices, such as caring for victims, writing or taking photographs. I zoom out from a micro to a macro perspective to examine Eidenbenz's writings and photographs as manifestations of material culture produced to instill hope for the future among the victims of the Spanish Civil War. I consider these literary and visual documents not simply as historical sources but as emotional objects that encapsulate the past for present-day audiences.
During the Spanish Civil War, photojournalism established itself as a modern practice. Photographers situated themselves as autonomous agents, offering passionate, implicated coverage of a war that engaged collective emotions. Their photographic practices were staunchly rooted in the tenets of observation without eschewing political commitment. In this paper, we argue that Spanish Civil War photographers, specifically Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, Kati Horna and David “Chim” Seymour, developed a range of visual practices that were entangled with questions regarding gender and politics. Both in the production of images and in their circulation and reception, photographers were acutely attuned to the politics of visually representing human suffering. Although ideals linked to the male soldier were essential to establishing the figure of the modern photo-reporter, we argue that war photographers produced something far more complex than a simple “masculine” gaze. By considering photographs that captured experiences of wartime displacement, we analyze the figure of the mother as a key visual trope in the Spanish Civil War archive. We argue that photographs of mothers on the move provide a window into understanding how, despite humanitarian claims to political neutrality, humanitarian photographic practice is deeply political in its ability to situate practices of care at the center of visual strategies deployed to narrate and represent the horrors of war.
This article addresses the protest culture of the Spanish anti-NATO movement during the first half of the 1980s. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, it focuses on the collective practice of painting murals and graffiti ( pintadas) on walls in the outskirts of Spanish cities. This was done by neighbourhood associations, together with local artists, in order to display and disseminate the widespread angst regarding entering and remaining in NATO. Murals constituted a grassroots multi-layered phenomenon that emerged through the interaction of different communicative actors, social processes and semiotic forms. The article explores three themes. Firstly, the political iconography of anti-NATO murals in Spain whilst comparing it with the aesthetics of other European peace movements. Secondly, the domestic reframing of anti-war and antinuclear icons as well as anti-American clichés, violence and the army, gender relations, Spanish national sovereignty and, more generally, the process of modernisation and westernisation that was rapidly affecting post-Francoist society. Finally, the analysis of these visual expressions offers a bottom-up picture of the final stage of the Cold War and a better understanding of the role of Spanish civil society during the period of democratic consolidation.
The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) was triggered by a military uprising against the democratically elected Popular Front government. Away from the battlefield, this war was characterized by the politically-motivated murder of thousands of civilians, many of whom were buried in clandestine graves throughout Spain. Following Franco’s victory and subsequent dictatorship, there were strong prohibitions on commemorating the Republican dead. A radical rupture in Spain’s memory politics occurred from 2000 onwards with the founding of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory and other similar pressure groups that have organized the exhumation and reburial of the Republican dead.
This article is based on fieldwork conducted in communities in Castile and León, and Extremadura as they underwent mass grave investigations. It examines the experience of theft and dispossession that occurred as part of the Francoist repression of Republicans. Accounts of these episodes focus on stolen and looted objects robbed from the dead during the killings, from the graves’ post-mortem, or from surviving relatives as part of the systematic dispossession of Republican households that occurred during the war and immediate post-war period. These narratives surface with frequency during the investigation and exhumation of mass graves. Despite the fact that many are lost forever, these stolen possessions can function as powerful mnemonic objects with a strong affective and imaginative hold. The narratives of dispossession explore themes of survival, the experiences of women and children, and the impact of slow violence. By invoking theft and stolen objects, these stories highlight forms of trauma and forms of memory that may not be represented fully by the dominant investigative paradigm of the mass grave exhumation with its inherent focus on death, cataclysmic violence and the tangible, physical traces of the past.
While it was underway, the brutal and chaotic Spanish Civil War was already being cast in contradictory ways by its leading participants. It was represented as an opportunity to lament injustice and the travesty of democracy, marshalled as positive proof that the European continent was in fact under the live threat of communist revolution, cast as a story of brutal anti-clericalism gone rampant and narrated as the battle between close-minded traditionalism and open-minded modernity. These contradictory understandings of the Spanish Civil War far outlived the conflict's conclusion in 1939 and have been played out repeatedly across the decades through the historiography. Thus, the Spanish Civil War has been represented by scholars as the fight between dictatorship and democracy, between religion and anti-clericalism and between conservative nostalgics and forward-looking modernisers. All of these narratives have some grain of truth to them. But what is so exciting about the up and coming generation of scholarship on the Spanish Civil War is that it asks new questions and provokes us to think beyond pre-existing tropes. In my contribution to this forum, I will focus in particular on one facet of this new scholarship, which is centred on the attempt to situate Spain and the Spanish Civil War within a wider, transnational, framework.
This article examines a campaign of jury intimidation conducted by female Republicans in the Irish Free State from 1926 to 1934. It discusses the rationale, logistics and key personalities of the campaign, as well as the policing, prosecutorial and legislative responses to it. The article demonstrates that a small number of women disrupted the administration of justice and generated a significant amount of publicity for their actions, not only in Ireland but also in the British press. In-depth consideration of this overlooked campaign brings issues of gender, state legitimacy, subversive activity and the vulnerability of the jury system into sharp relief.
This chapter follows a single iconic historical protest photograph across time, media and space, and traces and tracks its recent appropriation and mobilisation by different anti-fascist activists and social movements. The photograph, known as The Woman with the Handbag, shows a woman striking a neo-Nazi Nordic Reich Party member with her handbag. After outlining the relationship between photographs and memory in the age of digital reproduction and the methodology used to follow the photograph, the chapter discusses the photograph’s circulation before exploring what has happened to the cultural memories that it indexes as it has diffused digitally and been appropriated in different anti-fascist activist contexts. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the dangers of the collapsed historical and biographical contexts that can result from a photograph’s digital diffusion and activist appropriation.
The trauma wrought by fascism in Spain continues to haunt the country and spur various memory-oriented inquiries. However, the youth has not demonstrated thus far that it will continue the memory projects currently conducted mostly by the third generation, aged approximately between fifty-five and thirty-five. Activist art inspired by critical pedagogy can provide one effective framework for engaging the Spanish youth in remembrance of the Second Republic and the trauma caused by Francoism. The inspiration for Pinta Pasado, Crea Futuro was Judith Baca’s The Great Mural of Los Angeles for which she employed hundreds of marginalized youth in the late 1970’s. This project provides a framework for the Spanish youth to publicly recreate their own historical narration on the democratic achievements of the Second Republic and the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the fascist uprising, the ensuing war, and Franco’s dictatorship. While learning history in an academic setting rarely invites students to do anything with their knowledge, activist art inspired by critical pedagogy puts the youth in the saddle of transmitting history. Interacting with the past in this fashion can motivate the participants to become involved in historical memory.