Zaragoza, 2025
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In days when the erasure of Palestinian life in the West Bank and the annihilation in Gaza charges on, there is an attempt to not only to make these places uninhabitable but also destroy cultural landmarks in order to erase memory itself. This is happening bluntly and both gradually and rapidly, laying the ground for Israeli settlements and cities that will bear new names in a crass act of conquest and revisionism.For this piece, I wanted to process how these erasures in Palestine, past and present, alongside reflections on Zaragoza in order to attempt to understand how our relationships to place shift when memory is rewritten, viewing one’s present through another’s past.As we live among the remnants of the Nakba here in Israel-Palestine and practice a disturbing relationship of both familiarity and denial, Zaragoza also reckons with its past through Francoist monuments, plaques, and history, as fascism edges back into consensus. These symbols have been removed and reworded by law, contested by politics, or defaced by citizens and places renamed, as part of an ongoing struggle over how to remember, or erase, the dictatorship’s legacy.The site of my intervention is outside Torrero Prison, infamous during the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship for detaining, torturing, and executing thousands of political prisoners- Republicans, anarchists, socialists, and other dissidents. Today, it stands as a symbol of repression and a site of historical memory.After being abandoned for years, it is now a squat and anarchist community center hosting assemblies, punk shows, and workshops. The city has attempted to evict it and repurpose the site for municipal use, but these efforts have failed so far, as the community mobilizes and stands its ground.This transformation, the reclaiming of a place and its own story by the local community not only raises questions about ownership of space and memory, but also conjures an imagination of how, when the apartheid state and structures of domination in Israel-Palestine are dismantled and undone, we will position ourselves in relation to the bloody history we are enacting today.

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