The visual phenomenon of vandalism in the citizens' protest against the monument and Franco's memory

Abstract

Citizen protest acquires the category of vandalism where the anachronism of monumentality becomes an ideological abuse of public space. The public visibility of Francoism provokes a violent reaction in sectors of Spanish society that wish to eliminate its political narrative from the collective memory. This study aims to explore the vandalism of Spain’s monumental heritage in political protest. This exploratory study focuses on the act of vandalism on the commemorative monuments of great symbolic power inherited from Francoism. However, at the same time, it shows the effect of vandalism on the democratic monument that vindicates the memory of the victims of Francoism in the Civil War and during the Dictatorship. For this reason, we address the landscape linked to historical memory made up of what remains of Franco’s monuments and the monuments to democracy as a whole: the monuments erected during the first Franco regime in memory of the fallen, the monuments of the second Franco regime in which the names of the martyrs are omitted, the symbolic monuments of the democratic period in memory of the republican victims, repressed and exiled people and, finally, the monuments to democracy. In the methodological design, we have recovered the images of acts of vandalism collected by photojournalism between 2007 and 2022, the period between the two Spanish laws published about Historical and Democratic Memory: Law 52/2007, of 26 December, known as the “Law of Historical Memory” and Law 20/2022 of 19 October, of Democratic Memory. Empirical evidence is sought in recording the images that captured the attacks and their consequences. The analysis is framed within the current visual studies that add a multidisciplinary conceptual programme (history, semiotics, art theory, aesthetics, etc.). The results show the complexity of the significance and resignification of Franco’s monumental heritage in Spain and the characteristics of citizen mobilization against monuments related to Historical Memory. The study’s main conclusion is that the act of vandalism arises in the face of the inoperativeness of Spanish administrations (municipal, autonomous or national) in the urban regeneration of a Francoist heritage with popular combative replicas. Despite its illegality, this ideological vandalism is also understood as an insurgent response of the citizenry against the contingency of the symbolic contents of visual anachronism. While the Spanish authorities are resolving their presence in the public space in compliance with the law, a war of images has been established between democrats and small neo-fascist groups around monuments and memorials. Vandalism as a visual phenomenon implies the damage or destruction of images, but this does not always imply leaving a void. As evidenced in the results, the acts have the objective of replacing some images with others or imposing the symbolism of the ideology of the one who acts, thus giving an example of the political gesture that entails the vandalism action object of this study. The aggression against the monuments erected in memory of the victims of Franco’s regime is evidence of a visual conflict in the urban public space.