Those detained, disappeared and/or assassinated by the Franco dictatorship in Canary Islands They share a double tragedy: the silence of not knowing what happened to them or where their bodies are and the silence of the institutions and the State to help clarify what happened; a path that unleashes on all the islands in the sea.
The work carried out by the artists Miguel G. Morales and Eugenio Merino starts from this premise, who through their exhibition “Monument to Darkness” carry out an investigation that covers the dark path of the Canarian victims of the Civil War (1936-1939). ) and the military dictatorship (1939-1975), a dramatic episode on the islands that was considered minor in the national narrative.
However, among those intra-histories that Unamuno highlighted, those that leave their mark on history without being remembered in the great texts, one stands out that was fundamental for Morales and Merino, that of the republican poet from Tenerife Domingo López Torres, who is exposed in the cultural space El Tanque, in the capital of Tenerife, until September 10.
In the end, “Lo Unforeseen”, as the last work by López Torres is titled, written in Fyffes prison in Tenerife As a result of reprisal, it ended up happening and on July 18, 1936, when Francisco Franco declared a coup against the Second Republic and later established his dictatorship, death and exile were dogma on islands that never lived in the trenches, but yes its consequences.
The chicharrero poet was always closely linked to the sea and the port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where he worked in the goldsmith’s shop and later in a ship agent’s office, and it was there where he would find the end of his luck, in an imprecise place on the chicharrera coast, where he was thrown into the sea in a sack by the fascist side, a reality that Morales and Merino seek to denounce.
To do this, they submerged a plaque “in commemoration of Domingo López Torres in the place where he was assassinated,” Eugenio Merino told EFE, adding that it is “a really imprecise place” because his body has never been recovered, just like than that of all the victims of the Francoist repression in Tenerife, the island with the largest population and the most reprisals.
The audiovisual installation recalls that action, in which the seabed devours a metal plate with the coordinates of the poet’s murder, a “powerful image that emphasizes where all the others were thrown,” says Merino.
The exhibition takes place on a wall located in one of the old fuel storage tanks of the refinery in the capital of Tenerife, built in 1930 and the first in Spain, which served as energy food for the coup d’état and the Franco dictatorship .
“We want to resignify the concepts. On the one hand, the sea as a common grave for the entire Canary Islands, where they made thousands of political prisoners disappear. And on the other, the space of the refinery, which fed Franco fuel and was a focus of the unionist working class, many of whom were finally assassinated”, says Miguel G. Morales.
To remember them, the exhibition was attended by relatives of the victims, such as Luchi Morín, daughter of the girlfriend of the poet Domingo López. She was one of those who helped place the photographs of her loved one on the central wall of the space, while the artists read the names of those killed.
A symbolic act that for Morín goes further, with the exhibition of “memories” that her mother “gave her in a box of chocolates” and that now see the light, an exercise that for her is based on the need to ensure that such a barbarity “does not happen again”.
“I don’t know if something can be changed now, because what’s done is done. It can not be changed. But hopefully it will help young people to understand what happened in those times, which were a very hard time for all those who did not believe in Francoism. That is what there is and what there was,” concluded Luchi Morín, visibly moved.
