Beyond memory

At the beginning of 2023, Sensi Falán, a singer songwriter from Almería, presented her project Beyond Memory. She was born and still lives in the La Chanca, a part of the city populated by fishers, unskilled labourers, and many Roma people, and one that has been made famous by writer Juan Goytisolo and photographer Carlos Pérez Siquier. Interested in Latin American songs as a young girl, Sensi later studied flamenco and eventually became a composer. Her work is characterized by her solidarity with the poor and the marginalized. The photo of her on a beach standing next to a suitcase - the cover image on her album – is a clear reference to the exile and uprooting suffered by refugees. The beach invokes lives made across the water, in this case Mexico, but also those that are risked by people attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Africa today.

The theme of Beyond Memory is exile, but by dealing with the question of refugees today, it establishes a connection between the victims of the Spanish Civil War and the violence and misery of our own time. It contains ten songs as well as a number of texts written by journalists, historians, and writers, including some well -known cultural figures in Spain. There is a posthumous piece by Almudena Grandes, and work by María Enciso, the exiled poet from Almería, and descendants of María Méndez, Manuel Altolaguirre y Pedro Garfias, writers of the Generation of 1927 who had to go into exile after the Civil War.

Sensi Falán’s project was financed by the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory but it is also the product of collaboration with the Generation of 27 Cultural Centre of Málaga and the Almería Association for Democratic Memory as well as many individual volunteers. It is one example of the grassroots movement to remember, honour, and publicize the history of the losers of the Civil that began in the 1990s and that has, at times, been joined by government institutions and civil society.

The place of the national government in this process has often been ambiguous and at times contradictory. When Spain the conservatives have been in power:  1996-2004 and 2011-2018, it did next to nothing.  In contrast, during its time in power: 2004-2011 and 2018 to the present, the left has passed important laws dealing with the memory of the Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship. The contrast is less stark at other levels of government, in the autonomous communities and the cities, where conservative administrations have often enacted policies indistinguishable from those of the left.