Democratic Memory

1977 was an important year in Montserrat Roig’s intellectual project, as expressed in her productivity with the publication of Els catalans als camps nazis and El temps de les cireres and her increased activity as a cultural journalist. The publication of these works, as well as her management of the interview programme for TVE that began that year had intense repercussions on the Catalan public’s approach to the past in terms of its understanding of the trouble present during times, involving the institutional transition toward democracy, where the term “historical memory” was a metaphor of a craving for knowing and discovering the past.

It should be pointed out that this perspective puts Montserrat Roig amongst the European generation that applied a querying approach to the past, which helped to build a critical way of thinking about the status quo in the present. That European generation, which was at the fore of a great cultural revolution in the 1960s, was the one to start asking what role their parents had played during the conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s. Young Germans born towards the end of the 1940s and who had led the May 1968 student protests, wrote a disturbing question for their parents on walls in Cologne, Hamburg and Nuremberg: Was machtet ihr zwischen 1939-1945? (‘And what did you do during the 1939-1945 war?’). In the context of a dictatorship, Montserrat Roig’s work asked the question in reverse: What did they do to you between 1936 and 1945? with which she started the core of what have been memorial initiatives and petitions to this day and helped to establish the work hypothesis of an important long-survey historiography. We are in 1977.

The programme consists of an installation on Roig’s work at the juncture of 1977, commissioned by Manuel Guerrero, which can be seen at the El Born CCM. It will be accompanied by three months of discussions, debates and talks on the author’s work and the context she lived in. It comes under the programme for Mònica Luccheti’s show on Montserrat Roig’s works and the urban artistic contribution that will involve attaching photos of Montserrat Roig to the advertising totems distributed throughout the city, accompanied by blurbs on her work.