- The Memory Gara initiative presents the San Francisco Memory Space project: “A didactic space that will continuously change, with its own fund, that will investigate and give voice to the victims who have been excluded in the official reports”. They have called for the cooperation of the institutions, but they have ensured the independence of the project.
The Church of San Francisco was the nerve centre of the police massacre on 3 March 1976 in Vitoria-Gasteiz. A few meters from the church, the initiative Memoria Gara has presented the project Space for the Memory of San Francisco at the headquarters of the Association 3 of March, by the hand of Nerea Martínez Aranburuzabala, member of the association, and historian Josu Santamarina. Santamarina has prepared the project taking into account the conclusions of the March 3 Days: memory (k), space (k) and collective (k) organized by Memoria Gara at the beginning of the year. In these days, two memory sites of Argentina, Northern Ireland, Chile and South Africa were known and analyzed, among other places.
“The memory of March 3 will be of the workers, or not”
The historian has pointed out that the events of March 3 “cannot be used to gentrify the memory”: “If the elites want to design spaces of memory to avoid the notion of conflict and reproduce the values of the dominant classes, these values will be useless; the memory of March 3 will be of the workers or not”. His project seeks to recognize "other victims who have been excluded in official accounts", through a memory work "anti-repressive and feminist, which will be continually updated and will become a bridge between the past and the present".
Investigate “more and better” on 3 March
The initiative Memoria Gara considers that we must give a greater understanding of the events of March 3, offering, among other things, “the collective experience of that time”: “The working memory is complete and varied, but it has a great sensitivity to any injustice or abuse of power”. In addition to the events of that time, they want to accommodate the “cultural, artistic and political” manifestations that have since been given in the space of memory. The centre of rights will be space: together with human rights, economic, social and cultural rights. They intend to develop a “museographic” project that integrates their own fund, a research space and an activity agenda.
Institutional support and independence of the project
The project was presented at a press conference on Wednesday morning and will be presented to citizens in a public event at 19:00 in the Aldabe Civic Center.
Martinez pointed out that the project needs institutional support for its implementation. With this objective, from January onwards they will present the project to the Basque Government, the Provincial Council of Álava, the City of Vitoria-Gasteiz and the Bishopric. They stressed that support should not affect the nature of the project, since “the memory of 3 March is by no means an official or comfortable memory; we will clearly reject the idea that memory and this initiative is absorbed in a process of institutionalization that involves an attempt at domestication and rescision”.