El Camp de la Bota according to Francesc Abad The violence of political silences

‘To read the sentences passed by summary courts is unbearable. The same goes for the farewell letters and many other papers that should never have been written.’ (Francesc Abad, El País, 10 August 2007). El Camp de la Bota was conceived in 2004 as an open project to recover the collective memory and as an active interrogation of the violence of political silences. That year, the city of Barcelona built a new macro-facility and rehabilitated an area of beaches and shantytowns until then abandoned by the municipal planners, which was to be presented to the world as the Fòrum Universal de les Cultures (Universal Forum of Cultures). The new facility was built in the vicinity of Camp de la Bota, an abandoned space that occupied a significant place in the collective imaginary of the city. Since the fifties, it was here that most of the Spanish immigrants found themselves: having come to the city full of hopes, they encountered the reality of the shantytown. But above all, it was in this area that, from 1939–52, the Franco regime executed about 1,700 people.