The School of Memory is a family biography turned murder mystery, a new multimedia work where director-performer Héctor Alvarez explores his family’s complex relationship with Spanish fascism. Weaving documentary theater with critical fabulation, Alvarez reconstructs the circumstances surrounding his great-grandfather’s death at the hands of Fascist troops during the Spanish Civil War, and excavates buried truths about family, memory, and historical violence. Central to the piece is the live work of Chilean technology artist Attilio Rigotti, whose real-time manipulation of sound and video creates a visual language where archival footage morphs into living memory, historical documents dissolve and reconstitute themselves, and faces from the past speak directly to the present.

The project received a Humanity in Action Democracy Fellowship in 2024 to support its initial development. It had a work-in-progress showing at Human Resources in Los Angeles in March of 2025 and a staged reading in April 2025 at the King Juan Carlos I Center/Espacio de Culturas at NYU. In June 2025 the project was further developed thanks to a New YorkTheater Workshop summer residency at Adelphi University. That same year the project was selected for a Life/Story fellowship at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry in Atlanta.