The city council of Barcelona has in place since 2015 a program of memory actions to address both local memories as well as historical events including those related to pending past issues such as the remembrance of the victims of the Spanish civil war.
Our contribution focuses on three case studies related to the municipal actions of naming, inscribing and extracting. The first one is given by the official removal in 2018 of the monument of Antonio López, erected in 1884 in homage of a Catalan businessman enriched through slavery. The site has now an empty pedestal avoiding any historical reference although the pressure of collective groups -racialized and non-racialized- is to have on the site a memorial to slavery.
The second case is furnished by the commemorative site on the ground of La Rambla created one year after the terrorist attack on August 17th 2017, which while avoiding naming the international victims, shows the phrase 'May peace cover you, oh city of peace', mimicking the originally Arabic graffiti spontaneously written during the mourning.
The third study case revolves around the "Stolperstein" project of micro monuments initiated in Germany and dedicated to victims of the Holocaust that is being adapted in Catalonia to commemorate the fate of the Catalan political deportees to Nazi camps as well as victims of the Nazi repression.
These three actions have provoked a tension between local and autonomous governments, and a variety of reactions from civil society. Their analysis might contribute to debate the pertinence of these gestures, their global and local modes and codes as well as the political and social consequences that they might arouse.
The paper will also analyze how the modalities of memorialization in these cases -who act as a paradigm of some other current memorial actions being done in Barcelona- imitate rhetorical and discursive strategies that pursue some parallel goals beyond memorialization. In that sense some questions are to be discussed: are these contemporary memorials a way to inscribe cities in the imaginary of an "European Memory"?, what is the contemporary place of the Holocaust to be used as a way to recuperate a local history that is not related to the genocide? What are the tensions in recognizing the implications of Slavery and to inscribe it into the "narration of the nation"? What are the tensions between memorialization and tourism when tourists have become victims of violence?
