COLLOQUIUM: Images and counter-images of the Spanish dictatorship

THE EMPIRE OF FICTION: Images and counter-images of the Spanish dictatorship

The colloquium The Empire of Fiction departs from the exhibition with the same title currently in display at the Extremaduran and Latin America Museum of Contemporary Art (MEIAC-Badajoz, Spain), which explores the artistic appropriation and resignification of the images of the Portuguese colonial empire. This colloquium aims to broaden the issues raised by the exhibition to the Spanish context, through the debate on the uses of the image and artistic practice in relation to the historical experience and collective memory of the Franco period. Rethinking the determining role that the technical image plays in the perception of reality, this colloquium aims to debate the role that archival images play both in the construction of ideologies, as well as in the possibility of resistance to historical certainties and the immutability of their narratives.

This event has the participation of academics Anna María Guasch and Alfonso Pinilla García; artists Francesc Torres, Ana Teresa Ortega, and the exhibition curator Ana Catarina Pinho.

This event is organized and hosted by the 2021 edition of the Festival Robert Capa estuvo aquí, entitled "Legados", in Madrid, Spain. LINK

Cover image © Ana Teresa Ortega, Fotoesculturas.

PROGRAM

10h00 Opening session

Pablo Prieto, vicedecano de la Facultad de CC. Jurídicas y Sociales de la URJC

Uría Fernández, director del Área de Cultura de la Fundación Anastasio Gracia

10h15 Introduction and speaker's presentation (panel 1) Miguel Sánchez-Moñita

10h20 El Imperio de la Ficción Ana Catarina Pinho

10h40 La memoria desde una perspectiva transdisciplinar: historia y contemporaneidad. Anna María Guasch

11h10 La Imagen de Franco en la prensa de la dictadura: la construcción del carisma. Alfonso Pinilla García

11h40  Q&A

12h05 Coffee break

12h20 Introduction and speaker's presentation (panel 2) Tomás Zarza

12h25 Artist Talk: Francesc Torres

12h55 Artist Talk: Ana Teresa Ortega

13h25 Q&A

14h00 Closing session

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Anna María Guasch 

Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Barcelona, ​​having also taught at the Universities of Seville and Complutense of Madrid. In recent years she has directed her interest towards the study of international art from the second half of the 20th century. This is the result of El arte del siglo XX en sus exposiciones: 1945-1995 (1997), Los manifiestos del arte posmoderno. Textos de exposiciones 1980-1995 (2000), El arte último del siglo XX. Del posminimalismo a lo multicultural: 1968-1995 (Alianza Forma, Madrid, 2000), La crítica dialogada: Entrevistas sobre arte y pensamiento contemporáneo (2008) and Aprendiendo del Guggenheim Bilbao (Madrid, Akal/Arte Contemporáneo, 2007). At present her main lines of research are: Archive, Memory and Contemporary Art; Visual Studies, and Contemporary Art and globalization. Examples of latest work are the books Autobiografías visuales: entre el archivo y el índice (Siruela, Madrid, 2009), Arte y archivo. Genealogías, tipologías y discontinuidades (2011) and El arte en la era de lo global (2016).

Alfonso Pinilla García

PhD in History from the University of Extremadura, he has been a post-doctoral researcher at the Université de Paris X-Nanterre and visiting lecturer at the Université d’Artois. He currently teaches the subjects of History of Europe and Spain and America in the 20th century. His research career has been focused on two basic lines: the study of the historical event in the media and theoretical and methodological reflection in the field of the History of Present Time. Although he has also developed research on international relations since World War II, as well as on the history of women during the Franco regime, his main works focus on the analysis of the historical event in the press, taking as a chronological framework the Political Transition to the democracy in Spain. Since November 2020 he has been the director of the Department.

Francesc Torres (Barcelona, 1948) 

Lives and works between Barcelona, Spain and New York, USA. In his artistic practice, Torres analyzes images, objects and texts (the photographic index, the significant object, the written word) as a means of deciphering hidden or camouflaged ideological codes. As a result, Torres conceives his artistic practice as a form of critical intervention in history and as a means to explore the spheres superimposed on political discourse, collective thought and social action.

Ana Teresa Ortega

Visual artist, she teaches on the Faculty of Fine Arts of Valencia and co-directs the Master in Photography, Art and Technique of the Polytechnic University of Valencia. Her work reflects on the media as a territory of domination and its effect on a society that has forgotten how it is historically thought, the theme of exile as an allegorical evocation of various forms of forgetfulness and exclusion as well as the dissolution of the memory of history that since Different discursive strategies affect how our culture has been built and is built largely on forgetfulness, on intentional forgetting. These issues are dealt repeatedly and constitute the cornerstone of her work.

Ana Catarina Pinho

Research fellow at the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), and PhD candidate at the European Center for Documentary Research (eCDR) at the University of South Wales, in the United Kingdom. She develops her work around artistic, editorial and curatorial practice, as well as academic research on photography and visual culture. She is the founder and director of ARCHIVO, an independent research platform in photography and visual culture, and is a member of the research groups Global Art Archive, of the University of Barcelona, in Spain, and of Contemporary Art Studies, of the IHA-FCSH, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. Has recently edited the book "Reframing the Archive" (Archivo Press, 2021) and curated the exhibition "The Empire of Fiction" (MEIAC, 2021).