Reconciliation (2006)

Author: Manuel Clemente Ochoa (Cascante, 1937).
Promoter/financing: Government of Navarre.
Inauguration/installation: March 17, 2006.
Location: gardens of the Reina Sofía Hospital in Tudela.

The sculpture Conciliation, inaugurated on March 17, 2006 in the gardens of the Reina Sofia Hospital in Tudela, has a complex background. Originally commissioned by the Government of Navarre for the park of the Sartaguda report -dedicated to those shot in the Civil War-, its installation in that place was rejected by the associations promoting the project. An alternative site was then sought and it finally landed in Tudela, a choice that was influenced by the fact that the health center was celebrating the twentieth anniversary of its founding (February 20, 1986), as well as its geographical status on the road to Cascante, the birthplace of Manuel Clemente Ochoa. Although unintentionally, this tour contains a symbolism: a work designed to commemorate the pain of a war is relocated in a space of health and healing, offering a new framework of interpretation.

Under the degree scroll of Conciliation, the proposal of the sculptor from Cascantino addresses the topic of the dead of the Civil War not from a figurative point of view but conceptual, characteristic of his production. Executed in stainless steel and with a height of seven meters, the work of Clemente Ochoa is made up of two bodies between which an internal void in the form of a human silhouette symbolizing the hollow of the report and the absence of all the people who lost their lives killed during the Civil War is practiced. It is intended to reflect the deep feeling of pain at the tragic loss of loved ones in the war and to promote peaceful coexistence and human hope for the future, without the need to relive directly -and perhaps traumatically- the dramatic episodes of the past. In the final, the group wants to represent the rapprochement between two positions and tendencies and become a space for meeting and dialogue as a possibility of reconciliation. Manuel Clemente Ochoa avoids the anecdotal and opts for an abstraction loaded with content: instead of representing violence, he proposes future coexistence.