Surveilled Modernity: Images and Housing in Franco’s Spain (1939–1975)

Beatriz García Moreno gave a lecture entitled „Surveilled Modernity: Images and Housing in Franco’s Spain (1939–1975)“ at the Institute on Friday, October 31, 2025, as the conclusion of a research study stay at the Institute of Art History from September 30 to November 1, 2025, which was realized within the framework of the ERC project Housing.Yu.

Lecture summary:

„Through the analysis of official and domestic photographs, as well as other audiovisual media, the project explores the practices and discourses that, activated through the ritualization of public acts such as inaugurations, presentations, and official speeches, contributed to defining the boundaries between programmed and designed spaces and the spaces experienced by their inhabitants.
The project reconstructs the regimes of visuality activated around housing, both for its centrality in the regime’s political agenda and as an everyday concern. It examines the capacity of individuals to represent and appropriate domestic spaces as an expression of agency, while expanding the field of visualities associated with the domestic sphere, so that it is not limited to the official visuality promoted by the Francoist regime but also opens up to less normative representations and visual records that, in their apparent marginality, offer valuable insights into how the housing was contested and re-signified.“

More information here.