A Mal Tiempo, Buena Cara/In Bad Weather, a Good Face
Bebe Blanco Agterberg
How to live in a state built upon silence?
This is a photographic work based on a true story. It is a constructed story that includes images about how memories intertwine with reality and how they have a lasting impact on daily life.
The project is a reflection on the transition period in Spain that followed after the dictator Francisco Franco peacefully passed away in 1975. Spain needed to decide how to move from a dictatorship to a democracy. It wasn’t possible to have a clean break – a clear “problematic” before & “fixed” after. Some of the practices continued and still lay deep within the foundation on which Spain is built today.
One critical tool that was created in order to forget was the “Pact of Forgetting” (Pacto del Olvido) in 1977. The pact was an imposition that existed in different spheres. No one was held accountable for crimes they committed, facts were altered, new stories were presented by the government, and people slowly started to fill in the gaps of their memories with new information. Nothing was certain anymore and the pact became an assumed ‘historical truth”.
The project looks more widely through the reconstruction of memory how society can cope with atrocity. The work is there for a combination between the fabricated and the more documentary image and investigates how forgetting became a political tool.
In times of crisis which face should we trust?
Bebe Blanco Agterberg is a Dutch visual storyteller, based in Amsterdam.
"My work focusses on absence. Absence that we try to fill in with information. My mother found her biological family through a Dutch television show and even though she was reunited with relatives, many questions remain, including why she was given up for adoption. My mother was born in Spain in 1964, when dictator Francisco Franco was ruling. It always felt strange not being able to talk about my mother’s past simply because we don’t know exactly what happened. With my work, I’m there for exploring the process of reconstruction, and the distortion of narrative within memory.
The projects I make are dealing with the relationship between politics, media and citizens. How these three opponents feed each other, need each other, but also exist in a constant power struggle. I examine the reliability of the image in the post-truth era, it forms a grey area where fact and fiction live close to each other. This is the area from where I position myself.
My visual language is based on what I see in the media and comes from the connection I had with the tv show where we discovered my relatives. The show shaped and directed my memory so much and intrigued me a lot. I am therefore also specifically interested in that what has been manipulated.
I use artificial light in order to give a cinematic feeling to the work, which is based on emotions that tries to lure its audience into believing what is created in front of them.
In my work I take on the role of a director that investigates what truth means in modern times."
Actors Rule the World
Televisions are tools that are used to change societies by moulding the aspirations of ordinary people.
During its first showing, city streets empty, crime rates dropped significantly and power stations had to increase production. In 1973 “Seventeen moments of Spring” was broadcasted for the first time. It was one of the Soviet Unions most popular TV series of it’s time.
The main character a Soviet spy named Max Otto von Stirlitz was created by the KGB, too recruit new members and to glorify agents serving abroad.
Many wanted to be like Stirlitz, but one in particular ended up becoming one of the most powerful people in the world today.
Vladimir Putin was one of those viewers. In his first television appearance in 1992, Putin re-enacted an important scene, depicting himself as Stirlitz. This helped launch his national political career.