Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This essay explores the role of spectral characters in two contemporary Spanish plays dealing with Spain’s postwar years and Franco’s dictatorship. Los niños perdidos, by Laila Ripoll, takes place in an orphanage where three children from the Republican side have been confined by the Francoist welfare system since the end of the war. The close relationship between memory and the ghost is also evident in El espectro de la estación de Atocha, by Fernando Marías, whose monologue delves into one of Spain’s last colonial wars in Sidi Ifni, a former North African enclave of Spain that was returned to Morocco in 1969.

The media, as disseminators of historical memory, find in oral testimonies suitable sources to produce feminist journalism content capable of reconstructing the memory of women. To exemplify it, the space of Radio Nacional de España, Mujer y memoria, madres e hijas de la Transición, a pódcast that has been broadcast in 2021 and 2021, within the program Artesfera, on Radio Exterior and Radio 5, has been analyzed. They have used the direct testimonies of women who lived through the Franco regime together with interviews with specialists in this period (1939-1980).

This article narrates the vicissitudes of a historical documentation inaccessible to the collective memory of Spain since 1945. It does so, from the memory of who shared his childhood with the protagonist and then preserved and protected his Legacy. It is completed by the itinerancy, custody, dispersion, reunification, conservation and current availability of the Legacy of Juan Negrín López, Las Palmas 1892- Paris 1956- relevant personality of Science, the Teaching of Medicine and Spanish Politics of the first half of the past 20th century, The Silver Age.

After Hitler's rise to power, the Germans in exile, scattered throughout Europe, sought ways to combat this dispersion and confront fascism with their words, revealing these crimes to international public opinion and showing that them, the anti-fascists were the representatives of the true Germany. The writers had a key role in this process and literary magazines provided an important testimony of the militant anti-fascism.

We present a summary of the research we are carrying out in the international project “They:Live - Student lives revealed through context-based art practices” in which six countries participate within the framework of the Creative Europe grant programme. The goal is to collect photographs of student life on college campuses from World War II to the present day. From among the body of work collected, we made a selection from which we conducted interviews with its protagonists so that they could tell us the inner history of the selected photos (oral story). All these photos and interviews were documented in the online repository Topoteka. Next, we launched a competitive call in which in each participating country chose a creative pair of artist and curator who had to propose a contextual artistic project that considered these photos and interviews – and that will take place on the participating university campuses. Previously, these creative pairs stayed at the Institut für Kunst im Kontex, Universität der Künste Berlin. Then, travelling exhibitions will be held, first in rooms near the participating campuses and, later, in an international one with all the works. It is, therefore, an interdisciplinary method with the application of contextual artistic practices. All this with the aim of underlining how the life of students and their activities represent a living reservoir of innovative ideas and relationships, a source through which an evolutionary development of intellectual heritage can be followed, and a completely new vision of European culture and its future development can be established. The results of our project will serve as guidelines for managers of cultural institutions and art galleries, curators, and artists to improve innovative approaches to the development of young audiences. All this will be turned into a book in Open Access (OA) that will be published by the British publisher Intellect.

The public libraries in Catalonia were created in 1915 with Mancomunidad and the project of Eugeni d’Ors. Starting from 1920 they were directed by Jordi Rubió who arranged that the librarians wrote a diary where they could annotate questions relating to how the libraries work, but also the events and experiences that happened around them. This way the librarians became anonymous witnesses of what was historically happening in Spain and Catalonia for almost the whole 20th century because writing the diaries lasted until the 80’s. Until the year 1939 22 public libraries were opened, of which 19 have kept the diaries. For this article it has been exhaustively studied these documents between 1936-1939. More in detail, the entries written before and after of 19th of July in 1936 and those written in 1939 and also after the end of civil war have been given special attention. The aim of this investigation is to contribute for the acknowledgement of the library diaries as historical documents to study not only for the history of the libraries, but also for the history of our country and to acknowledge the value of the diaries as a testimony in our historical memory.

In this paper, we dive into the possibilities that exist when trying to represent the profound pain the Holocaust caused, assuming that, after the Shoah, occidental societies underwent a rupture with the traditional ways (mainly artistic) of exposing people’s feelings or fears. The extermination caused such suffering that it became deeply embedded in the cultural imaginary, causing a trauma that led to a crisis of representations. However, next to this alleged incapacity of art (in a normative or aestheticizing kind of way), other approaches emerged to deal with the exposing of the suffering. One of them was the testimony, the narrative of a survivor’s individual experience, who were determined to tell their story to prevent the disaster from happening again. We suggest that there is also a type of photography, that we called “testimonial”- opposite the “propagandistic-artistic” and the “circumstantial”-, that constitute the honest way of representing/exposing trauma. We can find a clear example of this “testimonial image”, which is far away from the conception of photography as art, in the series of pictures taken by a group of Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau, in August of 1944. Through the barthesian concepts of studium and punctum and always taking into account Todorov’s “exemplar” use of memory, we analyze the images to prove that, like survivor’s testimonies, they involve the total subordination of the desire of producing an aesthetic object to the need of showing/giving proof -even if that meant putting their own lives at risk- of what was happening in the camps, and thus, stopping the massacre.

Between 1909 and 1939 Barcelona saw the development of the profession of photojournalist in a context of evolution and consolidation of press photography, which culminated during the Second Republic and reached its peak in the Spanish Civil War. A huge legacy, part of which has been preserved to the present day. This article focuses on the authors, characteristics and conditions of accessibility of the most important collections held by different public archives.

This research analyses the presence of the Spanish press on Instagram. An eminently visual platform where national newspapers have begun to position themselves later than the rest of their international counterparts. However, in recent years, the growth of the Spanish press on Instagram has been very significant, but it has also been announced that its investment in audiovisual content is beginning to make a difference versus the rest of Western countries. This study will be conducted through a classical quantitative approach with the use of descriptive and inferential analyzes of the data collected from their Instagram accounts during twelve months of the following national newspapers (El País, La Vanguardia, El Mundo, 20 Minutos, El Español, elDiario.es and El Huffpost) and international press (Le Monde, Le Parisien, Le Figaro, Bild, FAZ, Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, The Guardian, The Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post).

Images of migration are frequent in the Spanish press due to current news related to these human movements. This research explores the capacity of photography to portray migrants and how is this graphic treatment. It focuses on the study of the photograph taken on May 19, 2021 by Bernat Armangue on the beach of El Tarajal (Ceuta) that shows the embrace between the Spanish Red Cross cooperator, Luna Reyes, and the Senegalese, Abdou. This image had an impact on national and international public opinion and was widely disseminated on social networks. Using an analysis protocol that describes the image at five levels (contextual, compositional, morphological, enunciative and global), this research brings us to the capacity of photojournalism to summarize very complex conflicts thus mobilizing public opinion. The controversy associated this photograph will allow the study of issues related to the ethics and deontology of photojournalistic, especially when it takes place in digital environments.