About
‘Flamenco After Franco’ is an AHRC-funded research network that studies how personal and collective memories of the Franco-dictatorship (1939-1975) have shaped the musical culture of flamenco, and that will develop strategies to raise awareness of these memories both in Spain and internationally.
Project overview
The aim of this research network, led by scholars from The University of Manchester (UK) and the University of Granada (Spain), is to bring together academics, artists and members of the culture industry to establish how personal and collective memories of the Franco-dictatorship (1939-1975) have shaped the musical culture of flamenco.
Workshops
Between September 2021 and August 2023, we will organise three events in Granada, Seville and Manchester to address a series of interrelated research questions.
Firstly, we aim to collate oral histories and gain a profound, ‘on-the-ground’ understanding of how the Franco-dictatorship has impacted and is remembered by an aging generation of flamenco artists.
The second workshop in Seville will serve to explore how flamenco has been a medium for those artists who survived the dictatorship to give embodied expression to their memories, and how flamenco can continue to be a medium for younger artists to engage with the unresolved legacy of the Franco-dictatorship.
In the second year of the project, a third and final workshop in Manchester will be used to explore, with international specialists of memory and performance and with leading members of the international culture industry, how artistic expressions of memory in flamenco can best be approached from a transnational perspective, in order to stimulate knowledge transfer and impact not only in Spain, but also to international artists, scholars and audiences.
Project team
Principal Investigator: Carlos van Tongeren (The University of Manchester)
My research broadly concerns the cultural production of Spain and Latin America with a focus on literary narrative, essays and performative forms in the post-totalitarian contexts of Spain, Mexico and Cuba.
I am now working on several interrelated projects and publications about performances of memory of the Franco-dictatorship in flamenco culture since the Spanish transition to democracy. Some of my previous outputs on flamenco were presented in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies (18.2) and during lectures delivered with the Plataforma Independiente de Estudios Flamencos Contemporáneos, the Flamenco Biënnale Nederland, and the Instituto Cervantes in Manchester.
Co-Investigator: Pedro Ordóñez Eslava (University of Granada)
After completing my joint BA degree in History of Art and Music Sciences, I qualified to become a guitar teacher in Seville and hold a PhD in Musicology from the University of Granada.
As a musicologist, my work deals with the intersections between music, arts, and poetry in the 21st century. Among my interests are new music and arts education, contemporary flamenco, and sound art.
I’ve been working and living for shorter and longer periods in Granada, Strasbourg, Berlin, and Paris. I’m currently working at the Department of Musicology in the University of Granada, running the Chair of Music “Manuel de Falla”, leading the Flamenco Studies Group in the same University, managing the Music collections for the publishers Libargo and Comares, and playing flamenco guitar.
Contact Us
+44 (0) 161 306 6000
