CARME CENTER. Museum, 2
The Center del Carme once again treats historical memory from a gender perspective (see Where the silences germinate), this time, through the lacerating issue of “stolen babies”” in prisons, maternity hospitals and public hospitals during the Franco dictatorship. Aránzazu Drunkard, professor at the City University of New York, has compiled in an archive the testimonies of mothers, daughters, parents and siblings who were victims of a Spain obsessed with racial hygiene in which the “psychiatrist” and military man Juan Antonio Vallejo-Nágera advocated the mental and moral inferiority of political dissidents. Besides, In the international context we discovered with surprise that, apart from Germany, countries like Sweden, Finland, Norway, Canada and the United States practiced eugenics during the first third of the 20th century. The other side of sleep in you It rests on large-format long-exposure photographic images that portray an absence about which there are no traces.. Pedro Lange-Churion, professor at the University of San Francisco, captures the glances of complaint, complaints and pain of mothers who hold baby blankets, photographs of the disappeared or official documents that certify the institutional nature of the crimes. He has chosen a tenebrist aesthetic because it is familiar to the Spanish Baroque and because many hagiographic representations have been made with it., also of the Virgin. The Center del Carme portrays the dignity of these mothers who investigate their own cases in the face of the passivity of the Administration and Justice, vital instruments in the pact of oblivion. S.M.
