Exhibition: Unearthing the silence by Sergi Bernal

Exhibition "Unburying the silence" by Sergi Bernal

Inauguration: Friday, April 24, at 20h 

Exhibition open to visits from April 24 to July 5, 2015 

This photographic exhibition by Sergi Bernal recovers the memory of Antoni Benaiges Nogués (Mont-roig del Camp, 1903), a Catalan teacher who, from 1934 to July 1936, worked in the small town of Bañuelos de Bureba. . A follower of the Freinet School method, in the midst of that rural and conservative environment, Antoni Benaiges encouraged the active and experimental participation of students in the creation of a diary with a school print that reflected their daily lives. The aim was to help them to achieve true citizenship awareness and to think for themselves. Also, aware of the importance of culture and education, the teacher also fostered an adult school in that municipality.

After the coup d'etat of 18-19 July 1936, Antoni Benaiges, due to his ideas and his way of understanding teaching, was considered an enemy of the new order that the most reactionary sectors of Spanish society sought to implan. On July 19, a squad of Falangists turned up in Bañuelos to detain him and, finally, was imprisoned in the neighboring village of Briviescas. Tortured and publicly humiliated for his political ideas and educational methods, he was shot on July 25, and it is believed that, most likely, his body was buried in the common grave of the Pedraja Mountains, (Burgos) discovered in 2010.

Specifically, in 2010, the Aranzadi Science Society located bullet shells and human remains in the La Pedraja Mountains. A gravewas discovered with more than a hundred bodies of reprisal victims of  July 1936. The photographer Sergi Bernal, for Sàpiens magazine, went  to photograph the exhumation process of those missing. There, at the foot of the pit, amongst relatives of the victims, he heard for the first time about the Catalan teacher, Antoni Benaiges. Alumni of the teacher introduced him to the reconstruction of the trajectory of Antonio Benaiges in that small rural municipality. The opening of the pit stimulated the biographical follow-up of a republican teacher, who, as was known from the Burgos neighbors' testimony, was still in Bañuelos on those school holiday dates because he wanted to take his students with him, after the harvest, to see the sea on the coast of Tarragona. The promise of the trip that he had made to his students signified his arrest and later murder.

This exhibition has three fundamental lines. First of all, it shows the cruelty and violence used by the coup participants in July 1936 against those who they considered their enemies in general. The second question recovers the figure of a Catalan pedagogue from the thirties and shows his commitment to the most innovative educational techniques, as was the case with the Freinet method. In the end, it shows the global repression and cleansing suffered by the teachers by the Franco regime. Finally, and as a third question, the exhibition emphasizes the importance and presence nowadays in all Spain of the question of the mass graves from the Francoist repression has as well as the recovery and identification of the bodies of the disappeared.

La mostra consta  de 32 fotografies, tres plafons explicatius sobre les fosses del franquisme, la repressió i la depuració dels mestres de la República,  i el mètode Freinet. Com a peça central del muntatge hi destaca una lona de 20m2 que reprodueix fotogràficament la fossa comuna exhumada a Burgos el mes d’agost de 2010. Així mateix, també incorpora un audiovisual que conté tot el procés de creació del projecte “Desenterrant el silenci”

The exhibition consists of 32 photographs, three explanatory panels on the graves of the Franco regime, the repression and cleansing of the teaching professionals of the Republic, and the Freinet method. As central piece of the set-up, there stands out a 20m2 canvas that reproduces photographically the common grave exhumed in Burgos in August 2010. It also incorporates an audiovisual that contains the entire process of creating the project "Unearthing the silence"

The exhibition is also associated with the publication of a book-catalog, Unearthing the Silence. Antoni Benaiges, the teacher who promised the sea (Editorial BLUME), which contains texts by Francesc Escribano, Francisco Ferrándiz and Queralt Solé, as well as photographs and research by Sergi Bernal.

The documentary The Portrait Portrait of Alberto Bougleux and Sergi Bernal, which complements what is shown in the exhibition, has also been edited. The documentary will be screened at the MUME during the exhibition period. The projection date will be announced later.

Sergi Bernal, (Barcelona, 1973), is a documentary and travel photographer. Degree in Geography and specialized in the field of territorial information systems. The report `` Unearthing the Silence '', a project that dignifies those who are missing and killed by fascism, won a major scholarship at the Can Basté Photo Forum in 2010.It is currently working with the last militiamen of the Marxist Unification Worker Party (POUM) who remain alive.

The exhibition can be visited at the MUME  from April 24 to July 5. 

Schedule: from Tuesdays to Saturdays, from 10h to 18h, Sundays and holidays, from 10h to 114h. Monday, closed.

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