Crime Scenes: Landscape, Memory and Atrocity in Jorge Barbi’s El Final, Aquí

Abstract

Jorge Barbi’s book El Final, Aqui (The End, Here) is a collection of 60 beautifully composed, predominantly rural and always uninhabited landscapes taken throughout Spain. All the images share a common secret: these remote locations are crime scenes, out of the way places where Republicans were executed by Francoists during or after the Spanish Civil War. Barbi states: ‘Places are not witnesses of anything, places do not see us; we recreate them [..] common places where apparently nothing ever happened, until the invisible memory they contain fills them with uniqueness.’ The function of his photographs in El Final, Aqui is to precipitate such a shift, to actively recreate overlooked places as abiding sites of memory.