5th Public History Festival. Silences that scream: cartographies, pedagogies and utopias of colonial Spain

In the context of the exhibition programming with a decolonial focus devised at the Thyssen in recent years, the museum, together with the Spanish Association of Public History (AEHP), the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) and the École des hautes études hispaniques e ibériques (Casa de Velázquez, Madrid), is presenting the 5th Public History Festival, with the title Silences that scream: cartographies, pedagogies and utopias of Colonial Spain. 

What happens when a past does not disappear but we learn not to see it? Colonial Spain remains present on maps, in museums, in cities, in stories and in ways of remembering. The 5th Public History Festival aims to make these traces visible and to question the silences that have hidden, displaced or transformed them. Mapping, teaching and imagining are ways of interrogating a past that remains present, as what is not named also forms part of memory, and listening to the silences can be the first step toward changing the questions we ask of the past.