An archive is made of memories and things left behind.

Three sites in three days. The first thing you understand about a re-enactment is that it is a battle without a winner and with all the dust of one. The town of Flix wakes up to smoke bombs in its streets, the kind that took the breath out of soldiers in 1938 and now choke a Sunday morning audience equally. In Vilanova de la Barca, halfway between Zaragoza and Barcelona, the mortar is meant for the other side — and arrives there.

The audience does not know this. The audience sees only the assault. They do not see the bakery, or the car, or the small radio someone keeps on the dashboard to listen for the signal.

02"The mortar was meant for the other side." Vilanova de la Barca, where in 1938 a plan held back Franco along the Segre.

03Re-enactors fall to the ground, pretending to be dead after being struck by imaginary bullets. During performances they can spend long times lying still, portraying the fallen of a real war.

A blank round is fired into the sky — not to hit, but to be heard. In the early months of the Spanish Civil War, dissuasive fire was often the only option. Many fighters had no real training, barely any bullets, and rifles that failed after a few shots.

A wounded soldier during the reenactment of the Battle of Brunete. He crawls reappears minutes later, limping slightly, pulled by two others along the edge of the road. No more audience, just the dark and the dust. They carry him through the quiet until they reach the light again — the improvised infirmary under the open sky.

05The improvised infirmary, Brunete. No more audience, just the dust.

06Two Nationalist re-enactors. Some, limping and battered, rejoin the battle.

"¡Viva Cristo Rey!" The cry snaps across the trench just as the Nationalist wave breaks over the Republican line. On this slope near Fayón, Spain's largest Civil War reenactment gathers more than a hundred volunteers — locals joined by Americans, French, Germans, and others — to replay the decisive 1938 Battle of the Ebro. Spectators ring the rim of the hill, cheering while the scripted assault takes place below.

For a brief afternoon, they share the same swirling dust.

The Battle of the Ebro began on July 25, 1938 and lasted 115 days. It killed somewhere between thirty and fifty thousand people. It was the longest, largest, and most exhausting battle of the war. It was also the moment the Republic stopped winning. When you stand on this slope today, that history is invisible: the wheat is the wheat, the dust is the dust, the cars on the road are commuter cars headed for Tarragona. Only the reenactment briefly reinstalls the noise.

Rodén has been uninhabited since its two hundred inhabitants fled the war. The exact moment it became a ghost town is uncertain, but it likely occurred between 1936 and 1937. The new Rodén sits across the road, a kilometre down. The old one stays where it was.

10Old Rodén, uninhabited since 1937. The new village sits a kilometre south, across the road.

Sometimes, you have to surrender. Here, a Republican re-enactor raises his hands during a Nationalist ambush in an olive grove. The soldier was caught in a moment of vulnerability, set in a landscape still connected to wartime.

Republican soldiers ready themselves inside a tank loaded with smoke bombs designed to simulate its destruction. The battle, their last central stand, symbolised determination against overwhelming odds. Strategy and courage were no match for dwindling supplies and growing isolation.

Three photographs from the period circulate among today's re-enactors. They were never published in any book. They survived in a shoebox, a leather folder, the glass cabinet of a town museum. None has a confirmed author. Each one bears only a date.

They are the kind of object the project hopes to lift from private silence back into the cartographic, public archive.

ACádiz · port · c. 1936A Renault FT tank hauled by horses at the port of Cádiz during the Spanish Civil War.

BFuentes · 1937An Italian soldier poses next to a destroyed BT-5 Republican tank on the outskirts of Fuentes de Ebro.

Sean Edwards is an American citizen living in Spain. In the project, he plays a correspondent photographer for the International Brigade. He uses a Wirgin from 1937, real, with real film, real techniques. Half the project's "reimagined" frames pass through his camera. The other half through mine.

In 2025, on the very ground where Gerda Taro staged a scene of resistance in July 1937, today's re-enactors prepare to recreate that act. Taro arrived after the battle, capturing a reality reimagined — prisoners with raised arms, staged to lift Republican morale — an act of propaganda within documentary form.

Taro was twenty-six. She would die on this front three weeks later, hit by a Republican tank during the retreat. Her name was Gerta Pohorylle, born in Stuttgart, and "Gerda Taro" was the alias she invented with Friedmann when they began working together. The pose she staged at Brunete became iconic. The retraction — that the prisoners were Republican soldiers playing prisoners — came decades later, after she could no longer defend or qualify what she had done.

17Brunete · July 2025Today's reenactors prepare to recreate Taro's act on the very ground where she staged it.

18Same site · wheatThe horizon holds the pose. A past held up by hands, set against the same dry light. The gesture remains, not in the bodies, but in the land — where wheat replaces memory, and memory replaces wheat.

The face of war is a small object. A composition of artefacts discovered by re-enactors during their exploration of the battlefields around Fuentes de Ebro: rifle butts, grenade rings, shell casings, shrapnel fragments, bullets, and the base of a bottle, likely used for wine or medicine.

20A soldier's helmet, pierced by a bullet. Light slips through the same wound that once meant death.

21An original, deactivated grenade. Among living historians, historical fidelity inhabits every object — glass canteens, wooden buttons, faded labels, period weaponry.

Three battlefields in a fortnight. Quijorna was fought on dry farmland — open fields, dry grass, little cover. Quinto sits on the N-232, the road that once carried the front, and is now traveled by trucks bound for Tarragona. Viver, the third, never happened.

On April 7, 1938, two bombs fell in Tàrrega. One exploded. The other didn't. Josep Flaquer wrote this in his diary as fascist planes flew overhead. The diary is in the project's holdings — on loan, photographed, scanned page by page.

Republican re-enactors in a trench, imitating the situation where Republicans launched an offensive in July 1938. The trench is real — dug for the day, on the same ground. The bullets are not.

Three frames around the same village. Fuentes de Ebro. A Sunday in 2024 with a reenactor still kneeling after mass. A church tower photographed in 1937, when the Republic launched forty-eight BT-5 tanks at this stretch of the front and lost most of them within an afternoon. And a bunker, weeks after that defeat, where soldiers improvised Christmas by candlelight. Within a year most of them would be dead, prisoners, or in exile.

The tower in the archive is the same tower the reenactor leaves behind when he walks out of the church. The bunker is somewhere under the wheat now, undiscovered or unmarked. The project keeps insisting: this is the same ground.

28Sunday. Mass is over. The reenactor stays and prays, as he does every Sunday. The front passed through here in October 1937.

DFuentes · 1937 · BNEThe tower outlasted the houses around it, as church towers tended to do in a war where both sides claimed God's endorsement. The battle that passed through here lasted an afternoon; what it left behind took considerably longer to clear. Archive: Biblioteca Nacional de España, ref. 30.8/199.

In a cabin ringed by trenches where soldiers once slept, they borrow a night from the dead. He lifts the bottle. "I love the Spanish booze!" Hemingway laughs — half joke, half shield. A contest of uniforms, as the soldiers once held. The room answers with laughter, smoke, and a cheap truce. Outside, the war waits at the door like a dog.

Hemingway files the dispatches from there. NANA, North American Newspaper Alliance. They are reprinted in American kitchens that summer. The captions to Capa's images are his, in the declarative register he used at the front: short sentences, professional distance, the affectation of a man who has decided to sound like a man.

Eighty-seven years later, in a cabin in Aragón, Sean Edwards in a beard plays the man who wrote those lines. The cabin is not the Hotel Florida and the bottle is not Hemingway's, but the gesture is the same: the foreign correspondent who is also, in the same breath, performing the part. The performance is older than we think. The war taught us to make it.

"You were the war photographer today; you deserve the medal."

Every participant in the battle reenactment received one. Natalia's portrait closes the journal. Her medal — paper-thin tin, hand-stamped, weight of nothing — is the inverse of every medal the war once handed out. This one says: you survived a play.