In this Link Room, we dig deeper into the work of Bebe Blanco Agterberg (The Netherlands, 1995), drawing connections to Spanish history as well as the work of two peers: Lucia Higuera (Spain, 1992) and Ignacio Navas (Spain, 1989). Additionally, we connect to relevant portfolios and articles from the Foam Magazine archive. Throughout this article, you find links that lead to contextualising articles, podcasts, videos and websites.

The goal of Link Room is to contextualise the works exhibited at Foam within the digital space, offer a wider perspective on the themes central to the exhibitions and draw connections with other, emerging, artists.

The initial concept of a link room was created by Foam Lab in 2015. As such, this Link Room is the online sequel of the physical link room that was curated and organised at Foam by the Foam Lab members.

Spain was ruled under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco for almost 40 years, until his death in 1975. The Franco regime went from being openly fascist to authoritarian over the years. In the first decade of his rule (1939 - 1959), repression and political persecution by the military was common. The Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS was the only authorized political party of Spain, all others were suppressed or tightly controlled. The expression of cultural diversity was also kept at bay. Catholic beliefs and Castilian Spanish were established as the regime’s main pillars and no other languages or religions were taught in school.

This cultural policy relaxed after the Second World War (1959-1975), when Franco became an ally for the US in its fight against communism, ending its political isolation and receiving financial aid in return. From then until Franco’s death, Spain opened to international markets and political organisations, but it maintained its repressive whiff in politics, suppressing protests and dissent.

Once Franco died in 1975, both left- and right-wing parties agreed not to address the crimes that had been committed during the Franco regime. They were seeking to avoid a renewed confrontation and revenge about the past. This agreement was called Pacto del Olvido (Pact of Forgetting) and was backed by an official pardon referenced by a party deputy as ‘’the only way to keep holding hands without resenting’’. Though painful and uncomfortable, the past went silent. Collective amnesia took over and Franco’s social legacy – as well as its monuments – were left standing.

However, the 1990s saw a transformation. Many of the family members whose loved ones were imprisoned, tortured and disappeared during the dictatorship, and the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) that led Franco to power, raised their voices. The wound could no longer be ignored. Since then, a new generation of historians, writers, filmmakers and visual artists have begun to discuss this repressed history in their works, looking to trace the afterlife of the dictatorship in their cityscapes, traditions and national symbols.

Bebe Blanco Agterberg is one of the artists who addresses Franco’s social legacy through her series A mal tiempo, buena cara. The title of her series refers to a Spanish saying, which translates to ‘in bad weather, (put on a) good face’. In the context of this project, the saying urges to remain critical of who claims power in moments of hardship. Bebe asks the question: in times of crisis, who do you trust?

The series grew out of Bebe's search for her own family history, sparked by the story of her Spanish mother who, for unknown reasons, was separated from her biological parents and given up for adoption as a baby in the 1960s. Soon, Bebe found out that her mother’s story was similar to that of other children during the Franco regime, and that little material could be found. The evidence had been mostly obscured by the Pact of Forgetting. This gap in the collective memory of Spain, however, provoked Bebe and inspired this three-year visual research on memory, truth and forgetting.

Bebe Blanco Agterberg's work can be linked to that of two peers: Ignacio Navas (Spain, 1989) and Lucia Higuera (Spain, 1992). Both artists address the legacy of Francoist Spain from different angles.

Lucia Higuera examines the remnants of the dictatorial past in present life rituals and behaviours. Ignacio Navas turns its gaze to the Spanish flag and ponders on the different meanings Franco's regime assumes in the private and public display of this national symbol.

Their crisp monochromatic images present silent - yet dramatic - scenarios. Scenarios which hark back to the analogue and journalistic snapshots that inform their research, blurring the boundaries between events, recreations and imaginations.

Zooming out, we realise that the topics of truth-finding and -questioning, as well as the manipulation of collective memory are very much present outside the context of Francoist Spain. In the past, Foam Magazine featured many captivating portfolios of artists that deal with these topics in their own ways, be it by looking at photography archives, contemporary media or imagery used and produced for political campaigns.

Foam Magazine #48: Propaganda, for instance, features Whitewash by Harit Srikhao: a series made in response to the violent riot in Thailand in 2010 and the political situation since. This work by Srikhao links to the use of photography for social control and questions how governments can enforce a national narrative or shared reality on its subjects.

Shown in Foam Magazine #59: Histories, the work of Tavares Strachan comments on the selective process of historical recording; on who writes history and what they deem worth remembering. For his project The Encyclopedia of Invisibility he reconstructed the Encyclopaedia Britannica and added 15,000 entries on marginalised or overlooked historical events, places and individuals, that had been excluded or overseen in the original books.