‘People were repressed into silence’: the Spanish artist creating a visual memory of fascism’s horrors

‘Trying to contribute to the creation of this visual memory of that horror is really important to me,’ Paco Roca said. Photograph: Courtesy of the Instituto Cervantes

The map of Paco Roca’s mind, a landscape of memory and loss, unfolds across the walls of an exhibition hall in Madrid, inviting visitors to acquaint themselves with the bittersweet geographies that have shaped the work of one of Spain’s best-known graphic artists.

Roca, whose comics have explored such varied themes as Francoist reprisals, the exiled Spanish republicans who helped liberate Paris from the Nazis, family histories and the depredations of Alzheimer’s, is the subject of a new show at the Instituto Cervantes called Memory: An Emotional Journey Through the Comics of Paco Roca.