Naming the executioner. Challenges of the artisticexperience to victimary memory

Abstract

The paper explores the relationship between art, literature, and memory to address the violence of dictatorial and colonial oppression in Spain, focusing on the representation of executioners and perpetrators. Using the recently erected statue of a legionnaire in Madrid as a starting point, it reflects on artistic interventions on the monument as a challenge to official narratives. If statues and monuments act as symbols of power, artistic interventions on them question and reinterpret these representations, revealing, among other things, the names of the perpetrators. Subsequently, the text examines memory literature as a crucial device for specifically naming those perpetrators whose final challenge to the democratic order was to try to conceal their identities. A legacy of Francoism and, in part, of democracy itself. Literature, however, has recently emerged as a relevant tool for uncovering the perpetrators, serving as an act of poetic justice for the victims. An act that makes the invisible visible, demanding public accountability from those who inflicted so much pain, even if the executioners themselves have already died.