The Democratic Skylight: Confronting Spain’s Enduring Politics of Violence
“You wouldn’t believe the things people have screamed at me in this room.”
Our tour guide for the Democratic Skylight/El Tragaluz Democrático exhibition in Madrid’s La Arqueria didn’t mince words when she brought us into the room containing materials related to Spain’s 1921-1926 colonial war in Morocco. I had previously read about this vicious war (generally known as the Rif War), in which Spain deployed a range of chemical weapons against civilian populations, but I had naively assumed that this aspect of the country’s history was relatively well known.
Gases de Guerra (War Gases), a book featured in the exhibition’s section on Spain’s colonial war in Morocco.
Text panel quoting heavily passive language in a 1922 article published in the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia.
As it turns out, denialism is alive and well in Spain as the country prepares to go to the polls for national elections this weekend. Our guide acknowledged that for some visitors to the exhibition, confronting the reality of Spain’s history of colonial brutality - and, crucially, its organic relation to fascism at home - was too much to handle. Or perhaps they were simply playing their role as well-trained supporters of the fascist project, responding to the facts of history with a combination of hysteria and intimidation in a desperate attempt to keep out the sunlight of uncomfortable truths.
An ongoing struggle
Inspired by Antonio Buero Vallejo’s 1967 play El tragaluz (The Skylight), the exhibition seeks to “condense forms of violence developed by states, armies, institutions and markets (e.g., the slavery market), as well as attempts by communities, individuals and collectives to resist and counteract them.” While the country’s period of fascist dictatorship (1939-1975) figures prominently, the organizers resisted the temptation to treat that period as exceptional. Instead, they emphasize the continuity of an ongoing struggle that stretches from the mid-19th century to the present day:
Over the course of a century and a half, we come to understand the origins and transformations of the modern Spanish state by studying its ways of politically administering death. Those who are confronted with these necropolitical techniques learn to resist them, imagining alternatives and developing forms of adaptation and survival. This is how the study of violence becomes inseparable from the civic memories of those who suffered, went through and resisted it: this compendium of practices, testimonies and experiences, we call democratic memory.
A crucial element of this process is confronting the reality that fascism, as Aimé Césaire so famously argued in Discourse on Colonialism, is the “boomerang effect” of a system of brutality originally applied in the colonies. The exhibition pamphlet describes these intersecting histories in terms of “pathways of violence and extraction” that have marked Spain’s history of colonial domination not only in Morocco, but also in other places from Cuba and Puerto Rico to the Philippines and Guinea.
Domination, resistance, and propaganda
To hammer this point home, the exhibition features materials documenting various examples of forced labor and other daily acts of structural violence in Spain’s colonies in the Americas. Alongside these examples are other materials highlighting how those on the receiving end of colonial violence sought to resist the imposition of a system that combined capitalist transformation with Catholic indoctrination.
Of course, Spaniards themselves were also targets of these systems even as they benefited (to varying degrees) from colonial extraction. During the Rif War, for example, photographs of dead Spanish soldiers served as effective propaganda tools to incorporate ordinary Spaniards into the colonial project and secure their support for the atrocities committed in their name.
Other materials displayed in the exhibition exemplified how the Spanish ruling class, throughout the decades leading up to the Second Republic (1931-1936), sought to suppress demands for democracy and social rights by constructing a “powerful Catholic-framed nationalism.” This effort involved mobilizing religious symbolism in combination with nationalist, militarist, and eventually Francoist iconography.
Histories of exile
I was struck by one of the exhibition’s concluding sections, which addressed the stories of Spaniards who went into exile at various points in the 20th century. These included leftists - those who supported the Second Republic and its radical democratic advances - who were targeted by the fascist state after the civil war, with nearly half a million forced into exile around the world in places such as Mexico, France, and the Soviet Union.
Francisco Jurado Ternero, Emigrantes ‘75 (Sculpture, Museo de Malaga)
Later, another group of Spaniards left the country in the mid-1970s to seek employment in Germany’s comparatively strong industrial economy. The exhibition featured a film profiling several of these workers as they returned to Germany and met up with others who had stayed and made their lives there. Some recalled their original arrival in Germany, when they were put on trains without any idea of where they were going or what they would find when they got there.
Still photo from film about Spanish labor migrants in Germany int he 1970s.
These stories of migration and exile brought to mind the intense racism and xenophobia of the electoral campaign currently being waged by the far-right party Vox. As right-wing demagogues in Spain echo their counterparts around the world with rhetoric of a migrant “invasion,” and as the news continues to be filled with horrifying stories of migrants dying in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, the exhibition called on viewers to resist the seductions of denial and remember their own histories of dislocation.
From formal politics to a struggle for liberation
Anyone paying attention to current political dynamics in Spain would find it difficult to miss the significance of the decision to hold this exhibition in the days and weeks leading up to the elections. Our tour guide’s calm explanation of both the historical material and the public response signaled an exhibition whose determined educational function - in effect, a small but essential blow against collective amnesia and denialism - could not be more timely.
It is tempting to conclude with a simple morality play excoriating Spain’s PP/Vox alliance and valorizing the ruling centrists (the PSOE) as inheritors of the country’s tradition of democratic struggle. As I’ve argued previously, however, progressive and radical voters here have good reason to feel ambivalent. Given what’s on the ballot, many are finding themselves with little option other than to “hold their noses” and support the PSOE and Sumar in their efforts to build a center-left coalition with enough votes to govern.
To its credit, the Democratic Skylight exhibition implicitly refused to let any of the ruling class off the hook. With its emphasis on the intertwined histories of colonial brutality and capitalist extraction, the exhibition reminds us that Spain is an ongoing site of struggle not only between fascist and democratic forces in the political system, but also between the capitalist forces that dominate the entire system and the social movements that have always sought to build a different, more liberating kind of society here. And that is a lesson that resonates far beyond the walls of a Madrid exhibition hall.
