After the quarantine: a closer look at monuments to victims of ETA in the Basque country and Navarre

ABSTRACT

The first public sculpture memorializing the victims of ETA in the Basque Country was erected in 2002, more than 40 years after the terrorist group killed its first victim. This article analyzes the social and political conditions that provoked such delay in recognizing and offering reparation to ETA victims and the consequences that the proliferation of these public sculptures has had in the Basque public arena ever since. Drawing upon key concepts such as “hierarchy of grief”, developed by Judith Butler, and Andreas Huyssen’s “memory boom”, the following pages argue that the absence of memorials in the Basque Country is a consequence of the changing politics of visibility surrounding ETA’s victims during these decades. Nowadays, plenty of Basque towns have erected memorials to their neighbors assassinated by ETA. However, not everyone is pleased with their presence, and other municipalities, controlled by Basque nationalist parties, have counterattacked, building their own monuments honoring the victims of the paramilitary group GAL. Therefore, after ETA’s ceasefire, the conflict seems to have found a channel in a symbolic struggle that concerns public space itself and exposes the complexities Basque society must overcome in order to build an appropriate, inclusive discourse regarding its violent past.

KEYWORDS:

• ETA
• memorials
• monuments
• memory
• terrorism

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Miguel Cereceda, professor of philosophy of art at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, for his course on monuments and public space developed as part of the Master’s Degree in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture, which he attended back in 2012. He is also very grateful to Eduardo Maura Zorita, Asier Aranzubia Cob and Luis de la Torre Tijero, all of whom read early drafts of the article and made constructive suggestions to improve it, and, last but not least, Emily-Jane Adam, who gave me valuable advice on its translation. This article has been written as part of the research project Larga exposición, las narraciones del arte contemporáneo español para los “grandes públicos” (ref. HAR2015-67059-P MINECO/FEDER).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Javier Fernández Vázquez is a film director and visual artist. He is a co-founder of Los Hijos, a collective devoted to non-fiction film, videoart and experimental ethnography. Its productions include are feature length films, such as Los materiales [The Materials] (2010) or Árboles [Trees] (2013), and the short film Enero 2012 o la apoteosis de Isabel la Católica [January 2012 or the apotheosis of Isabella I of Castile] (2012), which have received several awards and been screened at contemporary art centers and international film festivals around the world. Javier has also curated several film programs at the Centro Arte 2 de Mayo (CA2M) and Tabakalera. He is a PhD candidate at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and belongs to the research group Estudios Estéticos y Culturales (HUM F-077). He is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Audiovisual Communication at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

ORCID

Javier Fernández Vázquez http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8267-8824

Notes

1 The official website of the town of Ermua presents the memorial as follows:

“Como si de un monolito egipcio se tratara, describe la situación vasca actual a través de diversos símbolos: figuras caídas para siempre, figuras aún de pie pero amenazadas … y, como contrapeso, pájaros vivos que vuelan libres. Sin embargo, esta obra no se puede describir con palabras, hay que verla y conectar con su sentimiento íntimo. Un sentimiento que arranca desde abajo, desde el pueblo que se protege a sí mismo, y que está simbolizado por el acero que produce su propio óxido para conservarse. En definitiva, un símbolo del deseo de libertad”.

2 The plaque to Carrero Blanco was placed at the site of his assassination in 1974. From my point of view, it was not designed to stand out from the building nor catch the attention of passersby. Its color, shape and font integrate surprisingly well with austere style of the whole facade. Furthermore, Eser and Peters (2016, 27) add the following:

“Llama poderosamente la atención que a cuatro décadas la placa continúe allí sin mayor polémica. A su vez, el estado físico de la misma, cuyo texto no se puede leer con facilidad, simboliza la escasa importancia que se da al lugar y al emplazamiento”.

3 Even some of the most representative works of antimonumentalism that focus on the meaningfulness of plaques, such as The Living Monument (Biron, France) or The Future Monument (Coventry, United Kingdom) by Jochen Gerz, ultimately rely on a sculptural base.

4 Although this study focuses on the Basque Country and Navarre, the following point in relation to Madrid needs to be mentioned because at first glance it seems inexplicable. According to several sources, the first monument to ETA victims in Madrid was erected as late as 2008. This was the sculpture commemorating the victims of the attack which took place at the Plaza de la República Dominicana, 22 years earlier (Ossorio 2008) (Figure 2). Alonso Carballés (2004) describes the reticence to erect monuments to ETA victims as part of a historical tendency that started in the nineteenth century and which, contrary to other European countries, systematically ignores victims of violent conflicts. For further information regarding this lack of memorial policy, see the work by Fernando Puell de la Villa (1996).

5 The monument, called Agonía de Fuego, is located at the site where, apparently, one of the first bombs fell. The creator of the work, Nestor Basterretxea, said in an interview: “Parece mentira que no hubiera nada parecido. Estaba el Picasso – en referencia a la reproducción del Guernica – que es una maravilla, pero no había escultura” (Mingallón 2012).

6 A recent monument on Bilbao’s Gran Vía commemorates an English traveler who visited the city at the beginning of the twentieth century. His short notes about the city resulted in a famous song that is regularly remembered in taverns. Its first words are: “Un inglés vino a Bilbao”.

7 Authors such as Robert Musil - “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument”, (1987, 61) – and Harold Pinter have contested the efficacy of monuments as tools for memory. Though they open a very interesting path for reflection, it is not the aim of this article to pursue this line of argument.

8 Note that Begoña Urroz would not, therefore, have this right.

9 For further information, see Català i Bas and García Mengual (2013).

10 María Rodríguez Fouz compares the contents of this law with another text of the same period, the Law of Historical Memory, and mentions the “obligation of the Basque public authorities” as something that the Law of Historical Memory had avoided. The Basque Government had proposed, for instance, the production of a “memory map” marking the places in Basque Country where ETA had carried out an attack (35).

11 Once the strategy of emptying proved successful for the recognition of victims, more voices started to reclaim and defend their political legacy and activism (Reati 2011, 166).

12 At Christmas, every tree on the main street of my hometown, Basauri, bears a photograph of a local ETA member, symbolically claiming their right to be with their loved ones for this special occasion.

13 Figure 4 shows one of these installations: a row of empty chairs in the Plaza Easo in San Sebastián.

14 Judge Fernando Grande Marlaska, in the original order to remove the plaque, stated the following: “Poner el nombre de un parque a un miembro de la organización ETA supone necesariamente un acto de reconocimiento personal y, como tal, de validar el uso de la violencia para la consecución de fines supuestamente políticos” (“La Ertzaintza retira” 2008).

15 Agustín Ibarrola, a member of the platform ¡Basta Ya!, was subjected to harassment and threats by the supporters of the terrorist group. That the first monuments were his work gave them a dual legitimacy: both because he himself was a victim of ETA and because of the prestige of being a recognized sculptor in the art world.

16 Due to the so-called Ley de Partidos promulgated in 2002, which resulted in Batasuna – the left-wing abertzale coalition at the time – being outlawed, no councillor of that party was represented on the local council, and no representative of that political movement attended the ceremony.