La extracción de la piedra de la memoria. Una estética subalterna bajo el franquismo: el caso del cantero José Meijón

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.