The Extraction of the Stone of Memory. Subaltern aesthetics under Francisco Franco's dictatorship: the works of mason José Meijón
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http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4183-4776
Abstract
This article offers a case study after the works by mason José Meijón, an artist subjected to psychiatric discipline that, during fifty years, developed a fascinating project over the stones around the town of Marin (Pontevedra, Galicia). His invisible art represents today a telling testimony of the repression under Francisco Franco's dictatorship and of the problems related to the Spanish Civil War's memories. I will defend a possible reconstruction of Meijon's artistic corpus and a number of reading strategies to offer a comprehension of his work in relation to authoritarian developmentalist politics between 1931 and 1980. In order to do so, I will display Meijon's biography and oral legend in relation to his works and to the social and cultural space from which they originate. My goal is to offer a comprehensive reading taking into account history, biography, aesthetics and the space as a whole. In section two, I will present a short political history of Marin's territory and its transformations since the Spanish Civil War, to provide a general frame for Meijon's art. Section three, interrogates his art in relation to the local prehistoric engravers that he explicitly quotes, updating their codes in terms of avant-garde aesthetics. By means of this gesture, Meijon is organizing a memorial writing for the rich religious (protestant) and political (working-class and Republican) local democratic universe, destroyed during the war. Finally, I am interested in focusing political tensions that Meijon’s works arise today face to our so-called processes for the recovering of historical memory.
How to Cite
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subalternity, historical memory, Francoism, art brut
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