,... ... I r- . M. CINT A RAMBLADO- MINERO Sites of Memory / Sites of Oblivion in Contemporary Spain* En este articulo se ofrece un estudio de las estrategias de re-apropiacion y re- significacion del espacio asociadas a la reivindicacion de la experiencia de los vencidos de la guerra civil espanola. Su objetivo principal es la exploracion del significado de la imagen y el espacio en la re-construccion y representacion de una memoria disidente (contra-memoria) opuesta a la memoria dominante del franquismo. EI articulo se centra en dos exposiciones fotograficas: Presas de Franco y Cartografias silenciadas con el objeto de ilustrar los mecanismos de re- codificacion del significado que tienen lugar en procesos de reivindicaci6n y visibilizaci6n de memorias subalternas del pasado. The recent past of Spain has occupied a central point in Hispanic Studies in the last twenty years. In previous decades, nevertheless, the dynamics of memory with regard to the Spanish Civil War and its traumatic consequences were addressed almost exclusively by historians and political scientists (Ronald Fraser, Santos Julia, Paul Preston, Paloma Aguilar Fernandez, and Michael Richards to name but a few), who have made an enormous contribution to the development of memory studies in the area of Hispanism. More recently, the importance of memory, remembrance and the processes associated with them have become the focus of study in other disciplines as well, with the appearance of a series of works which have looked at memory from a cultural studies perspective, and which can be interpreted as a response or a reaction to the social movement for the 'Recovery of Historical Memory' in Spain. 1 However, as positive and optimistic as this situation may look, in the area of cultural studies which focuses on the use and re-denomination of space, the importance of images and objects as vectors of memory (as illustrated by the work of Hirsch • This research has been possible thanks to the support of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and their Research Fellowship programme. I am grateful to Sergio Galvez-Biesca, Fernando Hernandez-Holgado and Ana Teresa Ortega for providing me with photographic material for study in this piece, and to David Atkinson and Deirdre Finnerty for comments and suggestions on successive drafts of this article. REV ISTA CANA DIENSE DE ESTUDl OS Hl sr AN ICos 36.1 (OTONO 2G II)