Espacio y memoria: un viaje por las ruinas de la guerra civil española
- Autores: Carlos Bitrián Varea
- Directores de la Tesis: Marta Llorente Díaz (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) ( España ) en 2020
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Víctor Pérez Escolano (presid.), Carmen Rodríguez Pedret (secret.), José Enrique López-Canti Morales (voc.), Ascensión Hernández Martínez (voc.), Jordi Ibáñez Fanés (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Teoría e Historia de la Arquitectura por la Universidad Politécnica de Catalunya
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
- Resumen
This doctoral thesis shows the result of research conducted into the history and character of the villages that still lie in ruins in Spain, ultimately as a result of the damage caused during a war that took place between 1936 and 1939. The work has its origin in the hypothesis that inhabited places in which one coexists daily with a ruined nucleus constitute fertile ground for analyzing the complex and fundamental relationship between space and memory.
In the first place, the research has identified what these places are, after a thorough search of the Spanish geography that resulted in a list of six villages. In all of them, except for one that was never rebuilt, the State proceeded to move the inhabited nucleus elsewhere and ordered the former one to be abandoned. This thesis documents and analyzes the processes of destruction, reconstruction, abandonment and recovery in all these cases.
As well as studying the particularities with local detail, this dissertation aims to establish the general framework that allows us to understand the character of these dual populations with their respective hubs, one in ruins and a newly-built one. To this end I have investigated the reconstruction process that took place in Spain after the war, and the proposals made in this regard even during the conflict. I have especially given prominence to the work of the Directorate-General for Devastated Regions, the institution to which a good part of the rebuilding fell. As a result of this research, I offer an interpretation of the reconstruction process that includes technical, social and political ramifications; and analyze the main detected facets of the complex memorial prism constituted by these places so that we can understand the multiple character of the collective and individual memories deposited in them.
The thesis is structured as a journey from the university city of Madrid, where the proposal was presented at the Post-Wars Congress, to the Barcelona School of Architecture, traversing the places I studied and the landscape that unites them. In each of the villages I deal with one of the aspects that condition the historical nature and the memorial content of those spaces. In Valdeancheta I address the character of the destruction caused by the war and the forms it presented, which are somehow still contained in the current ruins. In Montarrón I review the political and technical process within which the reconstruction took place, and in Gajanejos I study this process from the point of view of architecture and urbanism. In Belchite I study the attraction the ruins hold, something which was cultivated during the war and the early Franco years, to understand the exceptional case of this Aragonese town, elevated to the category of a monument responsible for spatially transmitting the Manichaean message on which the war and the dictatorship were based. Here I also consider the political and social issues of the reconstruction process which, beyond the technical aspect, display the mechanisms of Francoist repression. Attention is drawn to spatial repression, which has been poorly studied and resulted in a large number of heterotopic sites. In Rodén I reveal the voices of the witnesses who have poured their memories into this work throughout, endowing with quotidian richness a set of spaces that are also repositories of personal memories. And in Corbera I analyze the treatment given to these places by the last period of the Franco era and by democracy.
Finally, as an epilogue regarding memory and space I propose a few considerations which, on one hand, defend the irreplaceable nature of the spatial medium in achieving a kind of memorial transmission and, on the other, analyze the possible role that these studied places potentially have as venues for a personal, collective, social and political rapprochement.
