Always Franco. Spain Brand: Eugenio Merino

This work engages directly with a Spanish tradition obsessed with the incorruptibility of the body: from Catholic relics to the mummified bodies of saints, passing through the monumental apparatus of the Valle de los Caídos (the place where Franco was buried until his exhumation in 2019 by order of the Supreme Court), Spanish visual culture has historically developed an intense relationship with the physical persistence of the dead. Francoism understood this symbolic dimension very well: Franco’s tomb was not conceived solely as a funerary site, but as a center of political and affective irradiation. The dictator’s body had to remain visible, preserved, and monumentalized in order to sustain a fiction of historical continuity. In this sense, Always Franco subverts this logic of incorruptibility: Franco remains here “incorrupt,” but no longer under the language of imperial eternity or National Catholicism, but rather beneath the industrial glow of Coca-Cola commercial refrigeration, a transnational brand associated with the symbolic expansion of global capitalism and with its capacity to infiltrate the most intimate everyday imaginaries: a political sign that visually condenses consumption, cultural imperialism, homogenization, the planetary circulation of desire, and oligopolies.

This operation acquires even greater force when considered alongside another fundamental work by Merino: Ruina. While Always Franco encapsulates the dictator inside a transparent device of preservation, Ruina works upon the monumental body collapsed, eroded, and transformed into an archaeological vestige. Both pieces seem to form part of the same meditation on the spectral survival of authoritarian regimes and on the impossibility of completely closing certain historical violences. In one, the body remains artificially preserved; in the other, the monument appears defeated by time. But even in ruins, the body persists and radiates an unsettling capacity to interpellate us.

Both sculptures can be read as contemporary variations around the notion of the “incorrupt body”: not the incorrupt body of the saint, but that of power. Francoism appears then not as a definitively concluded episode, but as a horizon of meaning that continues infiltrating imaginaries, architectures, family nostalgias, certain forms of authority, or the institutional silences of Spanish democracy. In an expanded sense, Always Franco is not a testimonial or militant work that deals strictly or concretely with the figure of the dictator Franco; nor is it a late and politically committed revival of his specific effigy; truly, Always Franco is a work about the survival in a latent state of our own capacity for self-destruction, a reminder that the incubation processes of fascism take a long time and that these processes are always patiently waiting for the correct moment to fully thaw and irradiate the social body like a prehistoric bacterium from the Siberian permafrost. For Merino, authoritarian regimes do not disappear completely: they change temperature, language, and surface.

There is also in Always Franco a particularly contemporary dimension: the conversion of the dictator into an object of visual consumption. The vending machine is, ultimately, a display case, and with it, a fierce commentary on the spectacularization of politics and the capacity of capitalism to absorb even the most traumatic images. Franco ceases to belong exclusively to the field of history in order to enter the flow of commodities, brands, entertainment, and the banalization characteristic of a society of social media, clickbait, conspiracies, and junk content.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that both Always Franco and Ruina dialogue with a much broader constellation of materials linked to queer memories, repressed avant-gardes, and cultures destroyed by the European fascisms of the twentieth century. The notion of the “incorrupt body” then ceases to be solely a funerary or political question and also becomes an archival problem: that of which bodies survive history, which deserve to be preserved, and which are condemned to disappearance or concealment. In this sense, both sculptures can be read as devices of memory that interrogate the spectral persistence of the past in the present and the way in which certain bodies —political, ideological, or dissident— stubbornly reappear among the ruins of the century, resisting disappearing completely.

Halim Badawi (Colombia, 1982 - resides in Madrid, Spain) is a critic, researcher, and curator dedicated to Colombian and Latin American art from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, especially the history of collecting, the art market, artist archives, and the processes of modern art in Latin America. On these subjects he has published around three hundred articles and essays, including the book ‘Historia urgente del arte en Colombia’ (Bogotá: Crítica, 2019). He is founder and

artistic director of Archivo Arkhé, in Madrid.