Extramural 2026. A Walk with Dora García

Within the framework of the artistic project Extramural. Timelines / resurrection, and as a conclusion to the panel discussion Death and Resistance, Dora García invites us to tour the Montjuïc Cemetery through a performative reading that activates its funerary and political archive. Tombs, mass graves, memorials and landscapes of mourning become the volumes of a living library, where each grave triggers stories that cross the social, cultural and political history of Barcelona.

Thus, along the route, the memories of figures such as Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, Bonaventura Durruti, Salvador Puig Antich, Salvador Seguí or Lluís Companys emerge, who dialogue with the mass graves of the Civil War and Francoist repression, as well as with the anonymous stories that inhabit the cemetery. Rather than reconstructing a chronology, the proposal relates different layers of memory to ask how collective memory is constructed, which bodies are worthy of mourning and which stories still remain on the margins.

The research is part of a broader framework of reflection that connects memory policies with contemporary movements for good death and practices death positive, which claim a more conscious and communal relationship with death, as well as with queer perspectives that question normative ways of understanding mourning, kinship and the transmission of memory. In this sense, the tour also dialogues with current debates on necropolitics and the politics of mourning, understanding funerary spaces as places where the relationships between power, memory and resistance become visible.

Far from conceiving death as an end point, Dora García proposes the cemetery as a space for political transformation: a living archive where absences continue to produce meaning and from which to imagine other ways of remembering, of creating community and of relating to death.

A proposal of the project Extramural 2026, by Dora García, Timelines / resurrection.

Coordination: Judith Barnés, head of public programs at the Tàpies Museum

[Image courtesy of Cementiris de Barcelona]