The Open House Valencia -OHV- festival is a privileged rendezvous between the city and its most prized architecture. A multitude of buildings open their doors, displaying their functional, typological and formal uniqueness. The capital of the Turia thus joins other great metropolises such as New York, Milan, Athens, Lisbon,... inviting all members of the international community to explore the collective space, entering the architectural universe to enjoy the richness of its history and cultural diversity.

Open House Valencia is a multidisciplinary project that is open to everyone and was created with the aim of helping people to live and enjoy the architecture, landscape and urban art of the city by promoting new ways of contemplating and inhabiting it.

It is a non-profit and cross-cutting initiative based on social cohesion and the participation of the greatest number of urban actors: students, young people, professionals, technicians, artists, musicians, shopkeepers,...

For a weekend, infrastructures, squares, gardens and buildings can be visited and explained by the architects and designers who conceived, transformed, restored and made them possible.

La Beneficencia joins this year's event and opens its doors with special visits:

21 October 2023: 10 am. Guided visit by Joan Seguí (director of L'ETNO), María Jesús de Pedro (director of the Museum of Prehistory of Valencia) and Rafael Rivera (architect responsible for the restoration of La Beneficencia Cultural Centre). Free access until full capacity is reached.

21 and 22 October 2023: The rest of the day's visits will be open to the general public, with free access until full capacity is reached.

Once again this year, the Espanta la por campaign is here to release our fantastic imagination with activities of all kinds, both for adults and for children. And as every year for the last eight years, we are not alone, we are accompanied by many local ethnological museums, libraries and Valencian schools!

This year we have something new: as well as being in the real world, we have also entered the world of podcasts. Espanta la por 2023 is the birth of The names of fear, the first podcast of L'ETNO in which we will reflect on the fears of adults, the fears of Valencian people, and we will be accompanied by Valencian podcasters on this four-programme journey, in Valencian, to talk about monsters, legends, literature, death... You are invited to the recording of some of the programmes, but please let us know that you are coming, lest you don't leave room for monsters and imagination!

Of course, we will also enjoy many activities in the "real world", which we are sure you will like very much. Come and have a great time in our space to scare the fear away!

Check out the programme!

Les silenciades. Sis casos de repressió franquista contra la dona a Paterna (Six cases of Franco's repression against women in Paterna) (València Provincial Council, Bocins Series, 2023), by Gema López García. 

Paterna was the tragic scene of the murder of 2,237 people during Franco's dictatorship, twenty of whom were women. This book aims to recover the memory of six of those women. Through their stories we will try to show a real image of the gender-specific repression suffered by all those women considered "enemies of the regime" during the Civil War and the dictatorship. We will be located in the Paterna Cemetery to enter into all the phases of the documentary and scientific process of recovery of the victims, which we have reached eighty years too late.
Through their names and examples, we will remember all the women who suffered the horror and fought against a regime that was cruel to the female population. They wanted them submissive, silent, devout, imprisoned, dead?
What they did not know was that they were burying seeds.
 

Gema López García (Madrid, 1985) holds a degree in Biology from the Autonomous University of Madrid, is a specialist in Forensic Anthropology and an illustrator. She is a member of the ArqueoAntro Scientific Association, and participates in the excavation, exhumation and forensic anthropological study of the victims of the Civil War and Franco's repression, mainly in the Valencian Country. She also participates with the ARMH in Asturias, and in several artistic projects related to democratic memory. She has participated in several publications and artistic projects related to Democratic Memory in recent years.

Cuando ya no quede nadie (When nobody is left anymore) (Grijalbo, 2023), by Esther López Barceló. 

Ofelia has just lost her father and, after receiving the news, she returns to her hometown. Once there, she finds not only her childhood home, but also a family past she was unaware of.

A mysterious Frenchman has turned up at the funeral who turns out to know much more about her father than she ever did. It is then that Ofelia wonders who her parents, whom she always saw as a humble railway worker and a stately concierge, really were.

What she is about to discover could completely disrupt her perception of life, her family and the history of our country.

Esther López Barceló (Alicante, 1983) is a history teacher, writer and cultural disseminator. She was a member of the Corts Valencianes between 2011 and 2015 for IU. With a degree in History, specialising in archaeology from the University of Alicante, she took part in the first exhumation of mass graves in a cemetery in Almansa in 2004. Her sensitivity towards the victims of Francoism is the reason that led her to write the book Testimonio de la memoria (Testimony of memory) (2011). In July 2018, she coordinated the drafting of a Democratic Memory Bill together with Alberto Garzón and representatives of memorialist associations.

She currently directs the Aula Didáctica de la Memoria Democrática of the Conselleria de Educació, Cultura i Esport.

Dicen (They say) (De Conatus, 2019), by Susana Sánchez Arins.

Dicen recounts real events in a network of voices silenced for generations.  It is not written from political reflection, but from poetic justice. It is a contemporary account of the Spanish post-war period.

It is not poetry; it is not an essay; it is not a short narrative; and it is everything at once. Written in short sequences, it gathers the intimate memory of a family and reconstructs their insignificant lives to show the terror of repression after the Civil War. Conversations, poems, stories, essayistic references, fragmented sequences that the reader arranges into a powerful story.

The narrative drags the reader to the end by the rhythm, the different voices, the authenticity and the gradual understanding of why that era is silenced.

The author speaks of poetic justice as a way of giving life to those who did not want to be named after their death: the repressors. This story recovers their names, their ways of acting, their personalities, their power. And it also brings back to life those who died in the ditches or lived marginalised: the repressed.

Susana Sánchez Arins (Vilagarcía de Arousa, 1974) grew up in Foxo, inland. She studied Hispanic and Portuguese Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela and obtained a DEA in Comparative Literature. She is a secondary school teacher. She studied and works in public schools. 

In 2008 she won the XXI National Poetry Prize Xosé María Pérez Parallé with the work (de) construçom (Construction) (2009), followed by the poetry collections Aquilatadas (Tested) (2012). In 2012 he published Seique (I know that) and in 2018 the poetic plaquette Carne da miña carne (Flesh of my flesh) and the book of short stories Tu contas e eu conto (You count and I count).

Isabel Cadenas Cañón (Basauri, 1982) is a Spanish journalist, writer and sound documentary maker, specialised in issues related to historical memory and with a focus on human rights and gender perspective. She directs De esto no se habla, a narrative non-fiction podcast about silences, with the participation of writer Laura Casielles, filmmaker Vanessa Rousselot and journalist Paula Morais Montes. In May 2021, she received the Colombine International Journalism Award for the sound report Una placa en mi pueblo (A plaque in my town), episode 3 of the series De esto no se habla (This is not spoken of). This piece deals with the case of "Las 11 de Basauri" (The Basauri 11), ten women and a man who were to be tried for aborting and performing abortions in 1976. Their case, after almost ten years of trials, became the precedent for the law that would decriminalise abortion in Spain in 1985.

She is the author of Irse (Leave) (2010), También eso era el verano  (That was also the summer) (2014) and Poética de la ausencia. Formas subversivas de la memoria en la cultura visual contemporánea (Poetics of absence. Subversive forms of memory in contemporary visual culture) (2019).

La Zafiriña Company - La Rambleta (in collaboration with Escalante Centre Teatral).

Author: Mafalda Bellido.

Year: 2018

Synopsis: Los que comen tierra is a text by Mafalda Bellido that arises from the I Laboratorio Ínsula Dramataria Josep Lluis Sirera, promoted by the Instituto Valenciano de Cultura.

Directed by Sergio Serrano, the play aims to give a voice to those who have no voice, to the dead of our recent history, to the thousands executed by the Franco regime who are still buried in the ditches and on the roads of our country. It is also a tribute to the families of these victims, who are fighting for dignity and reparation for the memory of their ancestors. These unopened graves are the thousands of unhealed wounds that we still have to rehabilitate in a country that is obstinate in making a tabula rasa of its most recent past.

A dry stone wall. A dry-stone bank that is on a road. A road that could be any road. One of our roads. One of our roads. One of our stories. Our story.

Cast: Mafalda Bellido Monterde, Lola López, Ernesto Pastor, Begoña Tena, Jorge Valle

There will be only two performances:

• The one on the 26th will be for all audiences.
• The one on the 27th will be for schoolchildren.

Lucía Sócam has spent years dedicating her lyrics to recounting the experiences of people who were persecuted or murdered by Franco's regime. She says that there are songs in which she has received texts, stories, poems... in which she talks about exile, the Civil War, the post-war period, the helplessness of many women, stolen children... "Chilling episodes that happened in different parts of Spain" and that the worst thing about them is that "they were true", she points out.

Her way of working is to raise awareness in society, as music is a weapon which, she says, perhaps because it is more entertaining, manages to reach a wide range of sectors. To people who perhaps have not read books on historical memory or who do not attend debates... it is a method of transmitting these stories through melodies.

For the singer-songwriter, the most serious aspect of this country's history is that to this day these acts have not been condemned, which does not allow for justice. Moreover, she believes that the silence that has been passed down from generation to generation is the result of fear and the traumas suffered by these people.

Sócam tells how, through the historical memory associations in her town, Guillena, in Seville, she discovered that her grandfather was on the list of people who had been victims of Franco's regime. She points out that she did not know that he had been in prison and that little by little she managed to get her elderly aunts "with the windows down and in a very low voice" to tell her something about it, "but not much", she says.

The music professional says that her grandfather's life was not at all easy: he fled his village, defended himself in Madrid as best he could and then was sent to the Battle of the Ebro. Later, he was arrested in Castellón and imprisoned in a concentration camp. Moreover, he was not the only member of his family to be repressed; other siblings of his grandfather were also killed, as well as a great-aunt of his for "knowing how to read", he says.

For the singer-songwriter, becoming aware of what had happened to her relatives and neighbours in her town motivated her to do her part through her compositions. In 1936, Guillena was home to 3,000 people, 200 of whom disappeared. "It is difficult to find a family without a relative who has been a victim of Franco's regime", she says.

By the restoration laboratories of the Museum of Prehistory of Valencia and L'ETNO, Museu Valencià d'Etnologia.

Activity that forms part of the cycle of cultural events organised by the Museum of Prehistory of Valencia and L'ETNO as part of the project Les fosses del franquisme. Archaeology, Anthropology and Memory.

Original title: La caja vacía (The empty box). 

Year: 2022

Director: Javier Falcó.

Duration:  60 min.

Synopsis: 

"La caja vacía" is a documentary about stolen babies with a specific case as the backbone. The case of María José Picó from Elche, with the participation of researchers, associations, technicians and Amnesty International. A documentary by Javier Falcó

NOTE: The opinions and comments expressed in this documentary by the participants are expressed in the exercise of their freedom of expression and therefore they are solely responsible for what they say. The team in charge of the direction and production of this document only collects these opinions with the aim of making them known to society. 

At the end of the projects, there will be a colloquium with the following participants:

• Javier Falcó Pérez. Director del documental La caja vacía.
• María José Picó Robles. Presidenta de la Asociación de Víctimas de Alicante (AVA).
• Soledad Luque Delgado. Presidenta de la asociación Todos los niños robados son también mis niños, profesora de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.
• Esther López Barceló. Historiadora y arqueóloga, experta en Memoria Histórica, exdiputada de IU.
• Ana Martínez Pérez. (Moderadora) Antropóloga. Profesora de la URJC. Coordinadora del libro Cuando el estado es violento.

Guardons

• Award to the Best Documentary in the DOCS ALC contest of the Institut Alacantí de Cultura Juan Gil-Albert of the Diputació d'Alacant.
• Official selection in XII Trobada Hispanoamericà de Cinema i Vídeo Documental Independent "Contra el Silenci Totes les Veus" in Mexico.
• Official selection at 16 Festival Internacional de Cinema Documental de l'Uruguai ATLANTIDOC.
• Official selection at the VIII Festival Cinema Ciutadà Compromés de València.
•  Official selection at the 14th Mostra Internacional De Cinema Documental De Montaverner MON-DOC.

Activity that forms part of the cycle of cultural events organised by the Museum of Prehistory of Valencia and L'ETNO within the project The graves of Francoism. Archaeology, Anthropology and Memory.

Original title: El silencio de otros

Year: 2018

Directors: Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar.

Duration: 95 min.

Synopsis: El silencio de otros reveals the silenced struggle of the victims of the long Franco regime, who continue to seek justice to this day. Shot over six years, the film follows victims and survivors of the Franco regime as they organise the so-called "Argentinean lawsuit" and confront a "pact of forgetting" about the crimes they suffered.