36 litros de gasolina diarios

How can we understand the traces of a place suspended in time and space? How can we walk alongside the spectres that inhabit an island? The islands of San Simón and San Antón hold a material memory buried beneath layers of time, salt, and state violence. A memory that is difficult to access, in which different life stories, narratives and accounts of what happened there overlap through absent presences that permeate the place. In Landscape as an Affective Image, Lucía Jalón reminds us of the importance of bodies and their encounters as fruitful opportunities to explore the traces that remain present within it. A memory that has not been fully verbalised —whispered, silenced, forgotten...— that emerges from trauma, but takes shape on the island through traces, presences, imprints and signs. A memory that can be articulated as an affective image, where each trace helps us to better understand the history of the place through bodies that, as they walk, are affected in equal measure by each imprint and each encounter.

Through a walk around the island and shared readings aloud of different materials, the proposal is to articulate or rehearse a collective and ephemeral memory that can speak with the ghosts present on San Simón. To think together about a possibility of memory and reparation that does not force the spectres to manifest under the cold light of the forensic lens, let alone exorcise them through bureaucratic and administrative silence. Instead, as Avery Gordon teaches us in Ghostly Matters, to explore how we can learn to speak with them, learn how they speak, and thus understand the complexity of their lived world, their desires and their perspectives.