Making Monuments from Mass Graves in Contemporary Spain

This book narrates how, beginning in 1936, bodies buried in mass graves during the Spanish War and subsequent dictatorship were turned into monuments. The book describes how the production of monuments evolved and what forms this process and these monuments took; it examines how the monuments were incorporated into society and used to influence public opinion; and it argues that this process was not simply based on the formal logic of tradition but instead reflected a conscious plan with a specific and rational end goal. As such, this book puts forward the idea that the monument as a material object became an expression of the historical consciousness of its producers, relating how different actors communicated their memories into meaningful gestures while limited by the material reality of integrating the bodies into a novel artefact. Finally, it contends that the people creating these monuments did not just bury their dead according to a funerary tradition but also sought to influence society.

Daniel Palacios González is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the UNED, and previously, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. He got his PhD at the Universität zu Köln as an MSCA Fellow and is a member of the research project NECROPOL at the Universitat de Barcelona. His book De fosas comunes a lugares de memoria (CEPC, 2022) received the Memory Studies Association First Book Award 2023.