Private Story
Eroding Franco
Summary
‘Eroding Franco’ is a documentary photography project that relates the silenced scientific information during Franco’s regime with the current desertification state of Spain. 36 years of dictatorship legitimized a culture of destruction and abandonment of the territory through the silence in favor of economic growth. Today we know that 80% of Spain will become a desert by the end of the 21st century.
The environmental problem dates back to the arrival of humans in the Iberian Peninsula (46,000 years ago), however, the gears that converted Spain into a ‘desertification machine’ were established during Franco’s regime and ‘Transición’ (1939-1982), with special intensity between the ‘60s and ‘70s in southeastern Spain, the driest region in Europe.
Francoism is usually associated with social repression but also established a state based on desertification, in which construction, agro-industry, or mass tourism were promoted as essential keys for Spain’s economy.
Commonly known as the ‘Spanish economic miracle’ (1959-1974), it turned out to be a mortgage that all Spaniards would pay throughout the 21st century.
Strabo already described parts of central Spain as ‘arid sprawling plains’, but each concession to coastal tourism, agribusiness, ‘zombie reservoirs’, over-irrigation, overgrazing, abandoned quarries, rural depopulation… was proclaiming an accentuation of aridity around the peninsula, leaving a desertified future Spain.
During Franco’s time, several scientists studied ‘Spain’s desertification problems’ and their implications, but the absence of empirical information in the regime’s media regarding matters of popular interest, as happens in most dictatorships, helped to legitimize this culture of desertification in favor of economic growth.
The Spanish society was unaware that they were raising an economic model that would threaten to vanish their country, while later generations inherited this ignorance and culture of habitat destruction. After 36 years of Francoism and silence, a socio-ecological awareness started to emerge, also in the media. Today, modern Spanish society seems determined to solve Spain’s desertification.
Thanks to the Visura grant I will be able to develop further this work: on the one hand, keep rescuing the scientific evidence and documents of yesteryear. On the other hand, the ongoing photographic documentation of these warned consequences while projecting it as a memory for our future.
On the other hand, 'Eroding Franco' is a very ambitious and extensive work, thanks to the lifetime membership I will have the opportunity to share this work that I consider so relevant forever with Visura.
Consequently, this grant also represents a genuine opportunity to continue demonstrating a silenced past, its present consequences, and a future that is as discouraging as it is uncertain.
