Based on the silencing of a Muslim funerary archaeological site located in the vicinity of the Center of Culture and Memory El Born in Barcelona, a critique is made of the way in which the memory institutions of the city remember some facts of the history of Catalonia, while arbitrarily forgetting others. The text denounces the erasure of non-Western identities in the city's official narratives of historical memory, and the exclusion of these collectives for colonial reasons from the processes of memorialization in public space. The installation vindicates the right to a shared history and demands the return of dignity to people and collectivities that have been affected by selective and systematic amnesia. The appearance of bodies from the past comes to remove unhealed wounds, and to ask ourselves about the possibility of embarking on memorialization projects that apply strategies to listen to forgotten groups, and that involve formal actions to redistribute the power to decide what and how to remember. 

Camila Opazo Sepúlveda / Memorias coloniales, silencios deliberados y amnesia pública en Barcelona- Polysemies of silence 

Collaboration: Mitmaq Ediciones, Sabers migrants 

Production: Camila Opazo Sepúlveda, Mitmaq Ediciones, Sabers migrants  

Support Assembly: Camila Opazo Sepúlveda, Mitmaq Ediciones, Sabers migrants 

Aknowledgements: Mitmaq Ediciones, Sabers migrants, Espai Avinyó and Oficina d’Afers Religiosos de l’Ajuntament de Barcelona, Colectivo En Palabras 

Camila Opazo (Talca, 1987) is a Chilean migrant woman in Barcelona, where she raises, creates and (un)learns from anti-racist feminism as a theoretical-political position of life. She is an activist and researcher, has been trained as an archaeologist and museologist, and has academic and professional experience in the field of management of colonial legacies. Her interdisciplinary work dialogues between anthropology, memory and heritage studies, art, museology and archaeology. Her research interests include post- and decolonial studies, feminism, migrations and diasporic communities, subaltern memories and the decolonization of museums. Her cross-border work intertwines scientific understandings with the experiences of struggle and collective works that have emerged from heritage management, public archaeology, heritage education and the re-elaboration of anti-racist historical narratives through art and poetry. Its high social commitment is evidenced in the continuous work in the areas of scientific dissemination, active participation in networks of feminist, anti-racist and anti-extractivist activism and the construction of knowledge in favor of social transformation.