the murdered bodies . We must , with Daniel Palacios , understand the monumental practices around mass graves as a gesture , rather than simply an artefact . A gesture that does not end in itself , but in the relationship established between the dead and the living , who read the history in the graves and monumentalism it as a form of experience and resistance , rather than as an institutional decision that can always be debated . In fact , these memorials , which not only include a small stone construction , but also an entire ritual that typically begins when the grave is opened , hark back to the pre-memorials during Francoism ( those forbidden visits to the graves , all the strategies to be able to leave even a simple flower at the mass grave , which the book also covers ). By involving bodies in this way , they avoid the risk of becoming monuments to oblivion , because in the bodies of the living , an experience is created . This is similar to what Michelet described after the French Revolution , when he gathered testimonies of people recounting how they saw their region , their fields , their country “ for the first time ”, no longer deformed by the theologicalpolitical institution of royalty , no longer someone else ’ s property . In other words , an experience tied to the skin and to memory , also tied to our beliefs . The experience is imprinted on the bodies , of both the living and the dead , and that is where memory resides , indisputably , beyond and far above the political management of the moment . Perhaps that is why , because this experience is possible , some families question the emptying of mass graves , and consequently the disappearance of the graves themselves , along with the possibility of a memory filled with fighters , not just victims , filled ultimately with resistance .
Daniel Palacios González
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