Fire and Wounds

Aligned with microhistory, which seeks to observe events far from the big stories, Miquel García deals with small fragments of the past from which the story expands and expands until it reveals a larger episode. Thus, the exhibition Fire and Wounds takes small fragments of 20th-century Spanish history from works that, as in the mechanisms of memory, work by accumulating layers of information that are veiled and revealed alternately. An example of this is Exhumació nº1, a video installation that presents the list of information of more than 5,000 people buried in mass graves in the Valencian Country during the Franco regime. This list, drawn up from the data provided by the historian Vicent Gabarda, has been covered with a black thermosensitive ecological paint that prevents the text from being read at a certain distance and disappears when in contact with body heat. Only the application of heat on the surface of the document can make it legible. Thus, the names of the dead emerge at the touch of the living from the darkness of oblivion. This almost phantasmagorical act entails an expanded notion of the archive document as the interaction becomes essential to reveal its content, making the viewer another element of the exhibition. In the video that completes the piece, members of the Paterna Mass Graves Platform of Associations of Relatives of Victims of Francoism, activate the works.