A Mal Tiempo, Buena Cara/In Bad Weather, a Good Face

How to live in a state built upon silence? This is a photographic work based on a true story. It is a constructed story that includes images about how memories intertwine with reality and how they have a lasting impact on daily life. The project is a reflection on the transition period in Spain that followed after the dictator Francisco Franco peacefully passed away in 1975. Spain needed to decide how to move from a dictatorship to a democracy. It wasn’t possible to have a clean break – a clear “problematic” before & “fixed” after. Some of the practices continued and still lay deep within the foundation on which Spain is built today. One critical tool that was created in order to forget was the “Pact of Forgetting” (Pacto del Olvido) in 1977. The pact was an imposition that existed in different spheres. No one was held accountable for crimes they committed, facts were altered, new stories were presented by the government, and people slowly started to fill in the gaps of their memories with new information. Nothing was certain anymore and the pact became an assumed ‘historical truth”. The project looks more widely through the reconstruction of memory how society can cope with atrocity. The work is there for a combination between the fabricated and the more documentary image and investigates how forgetting became a political tool. In times of crisis which face should we trust?

Televisions are tools that are used to change societies by moulding the aspirations of ordinary people. During its first showing, city streets empty, crime rates dropped significantly and power stations had to increase production. In 1973 “Seventeen moments of Spring” was broadcasted for the first time. It was one of the Soviet Unions most popular TV series of it’s time. The main character a Soviet spy named Max Otto von Stirlitz was created by the KGB, too recruit new members and to glorify agents serving abroad. Many wanted to be like Stirlitz, but one in particular ended up becoming one of the most powerful people in the world today. Vladimir Putin was one of those viewers. In his first television appearance in 1992, Putin re-enacted an important scene, depicting himself as Stirlitz. This helped launch his national political career.