Inconclusive

For decades, thousands of families in Spain have lived with an unanswered absence. Mothers who never held their newborns again, children who grew up without knowing where they came from, and parents who died waiting for answers that never arrived.

Between the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and well into the 1990s, it is estimated that up to 300, 000 children were taken from their families through forced adoptions and identity theft. Many mothers were told that their babies had died shortly after birth. In reality, many of these children were secretly given to other families.

What began as a tool of political repression became an organised network. Influenced by the pseudoscientific theories of psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo-Nágera, who claimed that Marxism was linked to a supposed "red gene, " the Franco regime justified removing children from women considered politically or morally unfit. Over time, this expanded beyond ideological persecution into a broader system of social control and illegal adoption involving doctors, religious institutions and intermediaries. Children were exchanged for money or favours, or taken because their mothers were poor, unmarried or socially marginalised.

Even after the end of the dictatorship in 1975, these practices continued in democratic Spain for years. Today, thousands of people are still searching for their mothers, fathers, children or siblings. Legal investigations have rarely led to justice. Many archives remain closed, documentation has been lost or destroyed, and those responsible often died without facing trial. Inconclusive is a documentary project that explores the lasting consequences of this history and the fragile relationship between memory, identity and absence. The title refers to a term that appears repeatedly in judicial files, used to describe evidence considered insufficient to pursue justice.

The project combines portraits of those affected with photographs of places where these events took place, including former maternity wards, religious institutions, private apartments and boarding houses. These images are interwoven with archival materials, creating a layered visual narrative in which landscape, testimony and historical traces enter into dialogue.

The work emerges from my own family history and an ongoing search for origin and identity. Through photography, Inconclusive gives visibility to those who continue searching while questioning a silence that still shapes the present.