The research group REPERCRI (www.repercri.com) organises this second international congress coordinated by Professor Anacleto Ferrer, Professor Brigitte Jirku and Professor Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, following the path of the book ‘El infierno de los perpetradores’ (Bellaterra and Alfons el Magnànim, 2019).

The mass crimes, genocide and political violence, explains Professor Sánchez Biosca, “are material acts that took place in specific places by human beings to human beings. The historians works at rebuilding its terrible mechanics, the psychologists to heal the scars, the courts to procure justice. But, the humiliation scenarios don’t disappear: full of suffering they added, actively or passively, to the material and symbolic heritage of a country and often they are subject of controversy also, as has demonstrated the case of Spain recently. To these representation spaces of tragic past in the present, we called them memory places and they are changing”.

This second congress, adds Sánchez Biosca, “deals with that duality of perpetration spaces: from its role in criminal task to its rote and commemorative uses. And this is done from a comparative perspective: tackling cases that belong to tradition and different stories: from the places of clandestine repression in Southern Cone of Latin America to the remains of the civil war in Spain, from prisoners of Khmer Rouge in Cambodia to the vast field of slavery that were made by Gulag, from the concentration camps of Hitler Germany to the dungeons of Comunist European Police”. The question of these places will stage different fields and complementary competences: literature, theatre, film and museums, among others.