My paper is based on the archive of photographs inherited from my grandfather, Sebastià Llop: positive slides depicting images of his family life between the 60's and the early 2000's in Catalonia that contain insight on the shifting ideas of family, collectivity and nation. My aim is to explore histories that were erased during the Time of Silence in Spain, and how those constitute a body of multi-layered emotional knowledge that speaks about the idiosyncrasy of a people. I will engage with it through feminist notions of affective epistemology and emancipatory discourses.
In my work, I will displace the photographs of my grandfather as he, and many others like him, was displaced from his village. Those moments, removed from hegemonic narratives, still resonate in the collective like earthquake replicas - by resituating them, they act as dialectical images that bring out subconscious notions of self, collective identity, and history. Language is another actant in this process: Catalan is not only the language that surrounds the archive, it's also a language that has rebuilt itself from attempts of erasure twice - first in 1714 and then during the Francoist Regime - which has lead it's speakers to have a distinctive awareness of their socio-historical relationship with it. Catalan figures of speech, lexical elements and recurrent grammatical constructions will be analysed in juxtaposition with the Photographs - I will act as a translator of the sensations that Images and Language evoke and position them into physical, imaginary, and ideological spaces. This is an iterative process of self-ethnography that highlights the dichotomic relationship between the historical being and the familiar/private being.
