The Act of Mourning

I do not have any other comments besides to applaud your creativity. I think you’ve made a visually appealing project and used your testimony to make something that is relevant to so many people as well as to the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War. Grief and mourning are often topics that people do not touch on enough, so I think that this is an important approach!

Because you contextualized the war in the brochure, I think that it advances your interpretations of the testimony. You explain why her family members were buried in those graves and what caused it as well as why they were not recovered for proper mourning by your interviewee. Further, I think that your discussion of grief and mourning in your project helps you to understand and sympathize with your testimony as well as the numbers of other people in Spain who experienced and continue to experience the same story from both sides of the war.

I think that the content of the testimony combined with the medium you have chosen makes your use of the testimony successful and relevant. It is very appropriate as a sort of personal testimony in a brochure and is something you see in most brochures or ads of this sort. This was very creative and summarizes well a very important part of this woman’s life. I think that your use of the testimony here communicates a point that many people who experienced the war and lived in its aftermath can relate to.

I think that you have chosen a very neat project medium to discuss grief and mourning after the war as well as mass graves and their effects on Spaniards. You’ve touched on the Franco dictatorship and how that affected people directly by causing deaths and then the effects after the war of mass graves, mourning, and grief. I think that these are important topics to discuss because of the repression of the Franco regime that prevented historical memory, the proper burial of the dead all over Spain, and seeking comfort or help to cope with death. You have chosen a very creative way to explore this information, and I think that it is very relevant to the topic.