 We will start by introducing Xavi, yes, we've known each other for many years and we met for the first time at a conference on footprints of the wall, at a time when no one was talking about this I think we're just a bunch of nerds and a publication came out of that but it's still quite relevant and ever since then we've met on and off and we've never lost respect for one another and I would like to say that Xavi was my boss, he's been one of the best bosses I've ever had, but I've always criticized that his time was very short in office I think the town council of Barcelona lost a huge potential when Xavi left town council I was really upset and he knows that because when I knew he was to be my boss it was like whoa I won the lottery and then this excitement lasted too short a time and the day Karma called me and said let's meet, I need to talk to you, I said well with you anything and Anna I met her on that day when Xavi said we need to talk and I fell in love with her from the very beginning too oh I'm sorry I have not said any of the official things I had to say Xavi is professor of the autonomous university of Barcelona PhD in contemporary history and his research interest is the civil war social movements generally speaking and the transition and these changes that link together politics and economy he has published so many papers and books and he also participates in talks on radio and Anna is a journalist a photographer and as I said I fell in love with her from the moment I met her and she presents with such passion that you cannot say no and I said well use me for wherever you need and here we are Anna her profession being a photographer has meant that she's worked in the cultural sphere and she worked with Xavi in Barcelona Sota las bombas Barcelona under the bombs which was a great exhibition that I hope you remember and she's worked mainly on culture she's also worked with great artists in the country such as Pera Javla and she also works with the Catalan Cinema Academy and the Malaga Civil Cinema Festival sorry I said Malaga instead and Anna and Tavier I think make up a perfect team Anna is the artistic side of things she brings her camera lens and Tavier brings his expertise and content but I always say that a team is what triumphs and this project could have not been carried out with just one or the other and well you can start because I think it will be a wonderful presentation that will make us fall in love with the project and will make us all want to come to the opening of the exhibit here on the 30th at the former prison La Mudel so you have the flow it is an honor to have you introduce us and I will first apologize to you publicly I've done it in private several times and now I do it publicly because I was my time in that memory commission was so brief I was unable to meet expectations at that time which was turmoil for me and well it is an honor for us to have you introducing us because your work the work that you've been leading for many years in the field of Memorial Archaeology and shelters has been a source of inspiration you will see it in the exhibit so I will not develop that now but I wanted to thank you not only for the introduction but for everything you've done over the years and why this talk basically what we will try to do is to tell you about the memorial significance of an exhibition that should already be open and so it would have been obvious these two days here together but since it isn't quite finished yet it will open in a couple of days so we would like to have you free up your afternoon to come here with us on the 30th and I would like to tell you about the context of these exhibit of 1322 shelters that is the consensus and it has to do with a subjective perspective it is a subjective perspective on honest pictures to valorize heritage in autistic terms despite all of the work done this heritage is still quite occult it is still quite covered up and not present in society and the idea of this exhibition is to work on overcoming the problems that democratic memory has had in our country in Barcelona in Catalonia in Spain building memory around shelters is absolutely necessary and it is absolutely necessary because remembering shelters helps us overcome many of the difficulties in remembering the war the experience of the bombings and a democratic memory that will allow us to get to know ourselves better as citizens as country and to be stronger when facing our present and our future and the memory of the bombings and the memory of the shelters oftentimes is dealt with separately and I think this is one of the weaknesses for a long time I would say it was not only forgotten but these about for obvious and not so obvious reasons the obvious reason is that when you build anti-fascist memory after the Second World War when you build European democratic memories well we here we're in the long black night of the Franco regime this country resisted the fascist the initial fascist efforts but we suffered for 40 years of dictatorship that's the most obvious thing but there's something else to that and this is why I think this memory of the bombings and the shelters is important and this is the construction on one hand of these European anti-fascist memory with a series of topics that made it strong back in the day but weak later on and here and I could talk about this for a long time and about Austrian and French memory but and well bombing them directly related to Italian fascist so I will talk about Italian memory in order to try and build a consensus in a very divided society in Italian society they built this memory based on two big topics the bravo italiano and the cattivo de disco italiens understood essentially as brave and good people and the Germans understood as the evil Germans the evil Germanic peoples the process of resistance and liberation in Italy conceptualized is conceptualized in Italy as a national liberation war liberation against whom the Germans yes but fascism had its own entity in Italy with Mussolini Mussolini well it seems he was Italian so this construction that of memory that tries to minimize and it's partially accepted by anti-fascist it tries to minimize the very harsh character of Italian fascism and it has two perspectives that have to disavow each other one is the war in Ethiopia because here you cannot build an image of the brava gente of Italy there and the other one is the Spanish Civil War Spanish Civil War for two reasons the participation of fascist Italy is essential at least in two sense one that at the beginning of the war Franco was not defeated these would lead us into a historical reflection that I cannot make here but all the troops from Morocco were taken to and the Lucia thanks to the Italians and here for the first time in Europe saturation bombing was practiced but saturation bombing on the population where the civil population was the main target and not collateral so it's no accident it is a necessary development of the war techniques for the second world war this is one of the reasons and another reason is that the Spanish Civil War was an Italian where there were Italians fighting on the side of the republicans and Italians fighting on the side of Franco so these myths were taken aside by Italian memory this shared experience shared to the extent and I will not develop this anymore but Italian anti-fascist were trained in the Spanish Civil War they fought in the Spanish Civil War and these disappeared this did not become part of official history and on the other hand the Franco regime after the second world war had no interest in any memory or any history actually they will negate any history that can link them to the Nazi Germany and fascist Italy there's this these narratives saying that Franco fought for Spain not to enter the second world war and it was the other way around it was Hitler who did not let him and anti-fascist European memories are weak and these can be clearly seen during the revisionism of the 80s and during the 90s once you negate you deny that there was a civil war in Italy from what revisionists say it was a civil war and once you have denied the harshest character of fascism they end up saying it was a civil war between two models of them the motherland two models of Italy where they were both culprits and victims it's similar to the narrative of the Spanish Civil War and it makes us weak because this memory is not connected to the experience of European fascism still and I think it's obvious and we heard the chronology earlier ever since the change of millennia there's been a whole movement of memorials activists for memory and a recovery of the memory more in the Catalan case but in the Spanish case this did not come with democracy it came with activists in the 90s and the 2000s democracy initially what it did was let's not talk about these things let's look at the future let's overcome the past because if we look at the past it seems like we're doing it over and over again these memories oftentimes built looking for the least amount of conflict and this is something that Jordi Giches said when this memory movement started he said shelters and bombings was the most interesting thing forgot for town council for an obvious reason first this is what impacted the most people in a collective experience so there is a memory a permanent memory in society but also because and this is why he talked about the need to remember shelters it can easily be turned into a narrative of the victims in which you only acknowledge the pain of the victims and you do not go beyond that and I will try to symbolize this with memory spaces bombings and shelters and then I'll pass it over to Anna it is obvious that Franco regime manipulated and negated a historic memory and the memory sites of the city of Barcelona stayed the spite these denial a memory site is a site in which you remember a historic situation that took place there and it evokes and condensates a series of events and experiences that go beyond that site there are memory sites that are created by political decision such as the value of the fallen which is the main fascist death monument in the world and I think it's very difficult to resignify it with memorial laws laws they've tried to resignify it and I believe in memory policies and defending memory sites but in some cases I remember that sentence that said oblivion is beautiful forgetting is beautiful so some places are difficult to resignify but sometimes the sites are so powerful that you need to manipulate them rather than deny them here in the back you see San Felipe Neri square this is a memory site in and of itself for several reasons it suffered the bombing of January 1938 and the first saturation bombing so it was an early show of Italian war techniques and in the scrimmage bombing against the civil population but also once the first wave of bombings ended and a second wave came which acted on those who had been spared or only injured during the first bombings so it's not only that you will die you are in my hands you are in the hands of the attacker I have a capacity to decide on your life and death and your capacity to save the injured and this is the way they they planned it when you look at what Mussolini said about these bombings that's what they said the show of power of fascism not very bravo italiano right not what we see in Captain Corralis mandolin and this new saturation technique that happened for the first time in Barcelona started with the death of 40 children so it's difficult to imagine a bigger symbol for this new war technique it killed innocence and it generated poetry and mandates people said this has to be remembered like this poet poetry that said say it to everyone say it here and there children have died but no one was able to say it because then the Franco regime came and we don't know exactly why this wall was maintained like this they fixed up the walls but they kept the shrapnel of the bombs in the walls and does a hypothesis I would like to give you a hypothesis the Franco regime tried to deny the bombings and when they were not able to deny them they manipulated them in what sense what they explained about this square which became popular wisdom so it's a manipulated manipulation that stuck they said this was not shrapnel from the bombs these were bullet marks from the reds shooting priests that was not the case these are marks from the bombs but they explained it like that and that stuck so much and I have not checked it now but in 2008 I remember a tourist guide that said a tourist guide for tourists coming from Barcelona saying during the civil war there were shootings here and in one of the walls there are still impacts from the bullets no there were no shootings here there were children who died due to a fascist attack it became memorialized there's a plaque and they decided this is shrapnel in San Felipe Neri and this is the monument in Gran Vía and why did they decide to build it in Gran Vía and that was an interesting question before I think a bit mischievous but a speaker asked does anyone know what this is because people walk by and they know this is something blocking their way it generates problems but it is a monument that opened in 2003 and the aim is to commemorate to symbolize the bombings of 16 17th and 18th March 1938 where that experience that had been lived in San Felipe Neri at 11 a.m. in a sunny Sunday morning ended up with three days of constant bombings in Barcelona this impact of this new war technique the United States ambassador claimed against it the Vatican as well the Vatican said we know that Franco is a noble person of deep Christian beliefs so we believe he will not let this continue to happen it was like a big everyone says that they they claimed against it but they were actually praising Franco when that happened so what happened with what happens with that monument the way I see it the monument is all right I will not get into that but I think it still reproduces some problems of a memory that is too focused on the narrative of the victims decontextualized of the reasons for the attack Jordi Kishé I don't know if it was today or yesterday but he built this melancholy memory of the first decade of the millennium a memorial combat at that time was very strong and I'm his same age and I think that when we get older we build this epic of our youth and things were not so strong back then and they are not as weak as we make them seem now and well I don't know why but I had to go through all of the files of the democratic memorial about the monuments of the town councils and the Catholic government facing their reality that it that republican memory was doubly clandestine during the Franco regime and afterwards during a democracy that did not acknowledge it and here in Barcelona this happened less but in the rest of Spain they still maintained Franco symbols in still in the democracy we maintained symbols of Franco regime so they opened a pool of funds to create monuments to commemorate the victims of the republic because no one is doing so and I had to go through the the files and it was quite interesting I was shocked because there were many town councils in Catalonia that starting I started by proposing a monument to remember the victims of the republic but three or four months later the name changed in the file and it became a monument to remember all of the victims of the war okay yeah that's fine but the line of financing was not for that it was for the republican side and then in the end it became a monument for peace which is fine but something happened along the way and the town council said oh oh oh look out okay let's say peace because we all agree to peace yes well but Franco also celebrated 25 years of peace with his regime yeah but things have happened here and we have to to tell people about them and in this sense the memory of the bombings which is because of its impact well when you drop a bomb a republican or a fascist may die bombs no no sites i was the Santillas said about the bombings in Lleida there's a picture of a woman with her husband on the floor and I think these were bombings of the conder legion and the person on the floor was a person in favor of Franco and he died due to a bomb dropped by Franco's allies so this is a memory that allows to build these symmetric memories and not get into too much conflict we talk about the victims and the monument has its black to people dead in fascist bombings and here it is easy to say fascist because they are Italian fascists yeah they were fascists that's it but then Francoists are the fascists or not we don't get into that it makes it easier to say during the civil war during the civil war in Barcelona and all people's victims of other wars it's okay it's fine I will not get into whether it's good or not but I believe that it does not respond to the need for contextualization to why these bombings happened what society were they part of these victims and what did they do because the problem with the memory of the victims and I'll finish very briefly sorry this type of memory is good when at the time of acknowledging the pain that is good but when you make the subject into a pure object of pain you are condemning them twice because of the death and because you're not acknowledging who that person was beyond that pain memorial policies and the declaration of the liceum they said we were the victims of Francoism and so the fighters for freedom so this is linking the repression with the resistance and the fight for freedom one thing cannot be without the other but you will see now thanks to I would like to thank the Carconesa for sending me the video this was the original monument that was planned in Gran Villa not the one I showed in the picture but this one which was the work of Francesca Bad and actually the committee they had to decide decided on this one not the one that was finally installed but this one the reasons for not using this one and using the other one I think well maybe if the Carconesa wants to tell us about it he will but why a committee makes a commission and he says one thing and then another thing happens well we one would need to see what happened there but this monument by Francesca Bad was a monument devoted to the victims of the bombings that advocated a shelter that looked like a shelter linking the memory of the the bombings with the memory of the members of the shelters and this expression of total warfare linked to the resistance to that total warfare and bombings yes there are memory sites from bombings but shelters are not a thing of the past they are a thing of the present we walk over them on a daily basis and contrary to public memory sites such as San Felipe we cannot access shelters oftentimes citizens do not know these shelters in all of their dimensions and actually the fact that we can now access shelters is thanks to an active decision of citizens activists memorialists neighbors associations a proactive fight a proactive struggle to open up these shelters and town councils opening them up it was an active decision and shelter shelters speak off and now I will finish they say that victims were not victims per chance it's not that it's not per chance the case of Barcelona is very obvious when you look at Mussolini's speeches Mussolini made this brutal speech he was absolutely proud they said we would not pass and we did we massacred them and it is a source of pride for Italian fascists to have massacred Barcelona and it is because Barcelona had become one of the big symbols of anti-fascism on July 18th 1936 Barcelona is one of the first places where the coup was stopped and beyond the experience of the citizens well it happened because of the experience of the citizens but fascists countered all of their battles as victories in Italy in Germany in Austria wherever they had fought they had won and the first time they were stopped or one of the first few places where they were stopped was here in Barcelona and this turned Barcelona into a symbol of anti-fascism and they had to obliterate it Mussolini signed telegrams asking for the bombings Barcelona was one of the first stages of the republican rearguard and this is why it was attacked massively however in order to understand that society because yes everyone was a victim of the bombings but the model of building shelters is different based on the values of the society the model of Barcelona was a collective building model where citizens basically decided to save the lives of their fellow citizens the citizens decided to make this huge collective construction work with their own hands and by their own means and the memory of bombings is inseparable inseparable from the memory of shelters and now I will finish just a couple more things one last reflection and I'll finish this exhibition when you are able to see it will open the 30th it has a different meaning as well and I talked about this a lot I participated I was commissioner of the 2007 exhibit and in 2008 when the underground is a shelter I think these were the two exhibits and back in the day those exhibits had a huge impact but I would say that every new present changes the past as well the present is a product of our past and we cannot understand the present without a past but whatever we observe in the past in each new present whatever we evoke memorily changes with the circumstances of our present it's a dialogue and in this sense I think that the exhibit that we've created contrary to the one in 2007-2008 takes place after the big financial crisis after the big crisis of the world pandemic and at a time in which there is a war again in Europe and in this sense the fact that we are going down to the shelters again and our perspective of the shelter goes beyond our need to strengthen democratic memory it changes and it shows us how we oftentimes walk on a city we do not know over a past that is under our fate but it's hidden this is why we're recovering shelters and a past that shows us that our present is fragile that whatever we consider absolutely normal can change overnight overnight citizens had to start building shelters to save their lives and I think this is something we want to do in the exhibition as well fighting for normality is a struggle as well it's not just accepting what is there is a struggle in which shelters continue to be a symbol of the resistance in Barcelona and that's all thank you very much good afternoon or good evening if you know me you know that today it's a very important moment because it's the first time that I'm going to share publicly a work that I have been doing for years and I'm doing this with two people that have had a powerful influence in my life particularly in the way of understanding history and memory and I'm going to start with karma mirror karma mirror I read a sentence and it's a center she had said the Barcelona shelters are the civil heritage and the most valuable heritage of people in Barcelona I have been thinking a lot about these sentences and has given me strength in difficult moments and it was one of the seeds of this project 20 years ago I met Xavier Shaby when he was teaching a course in Casa de it was the civil war from the perspective of those who lost the war and I think that was also another seed for this project that I'm gonna share with you and what I want to do is to share these pictures with you and I'm gonna try to move you as I'm moved when I think about the past the past the first key point of this project was born or happened three years ago I studied 400 shelters out of the 1322 in Barcelona and I went or visited 40 shelters I didn't know when I started how many shelters I could access I thought 50 Shaby thought about 30 we would manage to visit 30 in the end 40 we were able to visit 40 we wanted by the means of photography to show a heritage that has been hidden that the vast majority of citizens don't know we walk in a city that it's full of holes and when we say 1322 shelters in Barcelona everyone is surprised so we want all this accumulation of images images to to show the power of this network of shelters the pictures are not black and white pictures I haven't transformed the spaces we haven't turned these spaces into ideal spaces we have worked a little bit with the light to bring light underground it's a light that remembers the incandescent temperature a warm light that floods these spaces and sometimes we have had some problems printing or conveying this light but we really want to convey the past through these pictures I'm going to show first some accesses to shelters because we like these doors these doors open these shelter had a key this is the entrance to the shelter of Casas factory it's a picture we particularly like because we see the ground and the underground the past and the present it has the key hanging on the door and it shows how historical spaces the factory was very important and now are part of the everyday life and the owners are not aware of the heritage they have here another door this is the access and it's a staircase that Xavi likes particularly this is the access to the passive defense shelter of Catalonia we thought that this shelter had been destroyed because in 59 the building in Passage de Gracia 116 where the offices of the passive defense offices where and here we should mention Ramon Pareda but I'm not going to go into detail Pareda himself built a shelter to protect the alarm system the anti aircraft system he created a shelter quite an exceptional shelter it was a big there are only two chambers and the left and this is one of the entry points this is the second staircase going down and now I'm going to show you the access to a private shelter private shelters are in houses and these people have opened up the doors to their homes to visit the shelters that shows that people trust it in us and wanted to show these spaces that for many years have been hidden and they are still household places or private places the resistance memory you know what memory places are so I'm not gonna dwell on it but 1322 we wanted to create a map of memories of places of memory of the resistance for me it's special because visiting these places it's it's been a transformative experience for me as a photographer and I'm gonna show you an image that's the in shelter of the passive defense board I have chosen four shelters it's part of one of the part of the exhibition this is the command room for the protection of the whole Catalan population if there was an air attack a chemical attack or a marine attack it was connected with the army in the east east and it had this command room here you can see this tunnel and you'll see many pictures like this one in the exhibition it seems an exit an escape tunnel but it was the shelter of a military school which was located under the Pia school and I was there the other day and I was talking to some teachers current teachers and they didn't know about the shelter and I found out about the shelter because my daughter was playing at the basketball at that school and I was reading and I read about the shelter and a person from the school show me the shelter at that moment in Catalonia a war industry was expanding or was being created there were the war industry commissions and weapons were built to feed the republican side and here you can see the shelter of factory number 14 which is under the Silesian school now it's flooded and it seems to me fantastic a fantastic place we found a comb that was completely destroyed that we didn't touch this is the shelter under the generalitat palace this shelter was renovated thanks to Maria Contel who had the documents of this shelter until 2016 was not reopened we went there we took pictures in this for with these four spaces I think you can have an idea of what it means this idea to build the the memory of resistance you have an example of weapons arms an institutional shelter the command room the idea here was to maintain this political life underground when the bombs were falling I'm going to show this image to I don't know where Lourdes is Lourdes has edited the pictures and without her it wouldn't have been possible this is the seed this is the image I had in my head when I started the project I was walking in Barcelona I knew about the projects I'm not Catalan I come from Sevilla and for me it was something marvelous this heritage and I couldn't understand that Catalan people had not registered all this legacy and didn't give value so I started to make these compositions of images underground and street level here you can see this shelter we have this is in Passat de Simón you can see Sagrada Familia at the background it is a weird image it's not a comfortable one and here I you can see a subsoil and a street level this is Plaza del Duane this is Toledo street this is the shelter in Toledo street and there is a concrete hole and this is the poster for the exhibition this is Juan Negrín shelter and what you see above is a building that replaced the building which belonged to Rubiralta family and this fantastic building was demolished and a new building was built and under the building you can find the Juan Negrín shelter and I would like to talk about light I've been talking for two years with some of you about light and you might be tired about that I try to bring light to the underground but finding the right light it's been a challenge it is a baroque light to generate volume it's a hard light too and it's not always a comfortable light but for me light was essential I want to share a couple of images where light is very important this is the access point to La Lira shelter in San Andréu neighborhood it can be visited the association in San Andréu shows the the shelter and people can make a voluntary contribution they ask me when I went there for two euros but I spent hours there so I gave them 20 euros and here Juan Negrín shelter here you can see the light this baroque light you can see in here and I'll go very quickly we'll talk about the five parts of the exhibitions uh the five parts of the exhibitions 18 shelters this is the collective shelter the Barcelona model Ramón Pareda when he went to London he left Barcelona and went to London and he explained the passive defense model of Barcelona the model was called the Barcelona model it was a collective shelter underground this might seem obvious now but at that time when the passive this defense debate was very intense and Pareda contributed with the Catalan experience but that didn't become a network in the UK or in London here you can see an example v 3 7 2 that indicates that the family that lives in Valencia Street 3 7 2 will sit here in that place that helps to find people underground and indicates where the families could sit the second part of the exhibition is the prize is devoted to private shelters this is an access to the private shelter in Diagonal many pictures are from our accesses the former beer factory D'Am in Rosselló street has an incredible shelter underground big one large one with different levels I'm sharing here images from the same shelter and the fourth part or section the third section of the exhibition sorry the third one would be the factories and the fourth would be institutional life did was the shelter under the former consulate of the Soviet Union in Barcelona it's spectacular some people have visited it you find many images of the in the exhibition and the last section is a little bit risky we have three spaces like that spaces use as shelters not all shelters are built as shelters there were spaces particularly at the beginning of the warp underground subway stations but other spaces that were used as shelters this is under the post office we went there early in the morning and these are the images we took so I've shared the five sections of the exhibition and I try to connect with an idea that Xavi mentioned which is the attempt to photograph heritage right now in present time and this is one of the lines of the research and the project I'm going to show three spaces that connect horizontally and vertically underground and above ground past and present here this is the Passaggio Simo shelter with the concrete it it takes us back to the desarrollismo time in the city and the building and building that finally has an impact underground underground and above ground past and present you see the catalan vault that combines this with the modern image of concrete bookstore like an explicapla sands neighborhood is a fantastic space I recommend going there because they have fantastic books we in fact we're gonna launch the book there and it talks about the new uses of resources this bookstore has used the collective shelter this is the access they make book presentations book launches in the shelter they have underground and finally here a picture of right camp again some roots and this is there are many roots in the shelters this is the picture of a parking lot that gives access to the shelter in revolution square is another picture that links past and present and I'm going to show pictures of what was live under the bombs is another goal of this project by means of showing objects that tell us how was live in the shelters that mirror in tetuana square shelter here some cans will find also objects that we found in archaeological sites and that will be shown for the first time here a soup pot that was partially melted pales for the building of shelters there are many objects that were used to build the shelter breaks from the 307 shelter and electrical equipment that was essential like bulbs here you can see depuration liquid that was very popular at the time we found it at bernard metre shelter and this is the image of the poster for the exhibition that will open in may you will be able to see the exhibition here in la model former prison till july thank you very much