What if we imagined Franco upside down? Turned inside out, his insides spilling out; or from behind, or with his head and feet reversed, looking up from below or from the periphery. To picture him upside down is to open ourselves to artistic imagination; it implies assuming an inverted image of everyday reality in order to observe what the man doesn't say, to delve from another perspective into the nature of his actions.

It implies a re-education of our gaze because it demands attention, awareness, and a break from the automatic perception of familiar images. And, on a symbolic level, it entails a shift in common sense, a questioning of the dominant viewpoint, and thinking from the other side, from the margins, or from what is usually buried. It means denaturalizing inherited culture and conceiving of it as a historical construct, full of seams, artifices, and power structures, of silences and absences that continue to sustain the illusion of Franco. In short, it implies revisiting him with a sense of wonder or estrangement to discover a new understanding of a crucial figure in the past, memory, and history of this country on the fiftieth anniversary of the dictator's death.

The event was attended by Nancy Berthier, director of Casa de Velázquez and School of Higher Hispanic and Iberian Studies (EHEHI), Mery Sales, painter, Eugenio Merino, sculptor and Diego Salgado, cultural critic.

Moderated by Jesús Izquierdo Martín (Spanish Association of Public History / UAM)