 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Univerity, one of the memory venues of the city, which will develop even further in coming years, and it will be even more than it is now. We're here today to introduce these international sessions entitled Shelters, Citizens, Memorians and Subsorials in Europe, and we do so in Barcelona, and this is one of the first conferences, an international conference, in which we make a comparison of shelters from Barcelona and shelters from other European capital cities. Here with me at the table, I have the people who have promoted and organized this conference, and all the devices that we will tell you about now, because today we are starting up a piece, a device to commemorate Barcelona shelters and compare them with others in the world. We will start now with these international conferences, we will continue with an exhibit, and then we will continue with two books that I'll pass over first to Jordi Guixi, director of the European Observatory on Memories of the Solidarity Foundation of the University of Barcelona, and afterwards the curators of the exhibition, Charlie Dominic and Anna Sánchez. So, Jordi, you have the floor. Thank you, Jordi. Thank you, Jordi. Good morning, everyone, and thank you very much. Javier, Jordi, Emma, your colleagues and attendees and the collaborators who will participate in the different panels and tables coming from different places in Europe. Good morning. First of all, because I always forget it at the end otherwise, I would like to say a few words of appreciation, the European Observatory on Memories, when he caught me a while back, he said we have a project, we've talked to the town council of Barcelona about airport shelters, and has very good photographic materials of hundreds of shelters, and I said, of course, yes, we will discuss the details, but of course, let's do it. It couldn't be any other way. And also in the framework of a collaboration agreement, which is well known by all and has been very fruitful, not only on shelters, but on other aspects and the development of memory activities and the Department of Memory. So I would like to thank the town council of Barcelona for their task and their collaboration. Axel Domimolov, the archaeology service who has collaborated and been a part, a very active part, on the preparation of contents and the structure of part of these content. The commissioners of the exhibition, they will talk to each other. Our team and the team of interpreters, Silvia Palá, who is somewhere at the back and who very nicely brought us coffee before. Our team, Andrea, Milanka, Ricard Conesa for his great task, Fernanda at the back as well, Javier Navad, good morning, Ramon, sorry. And there will be also the staff here who with these activity and others, exhibition and the in-between management of this memory space that we hope to continue to drive into the future, La Moudelle, Treza Angelz and Laia. I'm sure I forgot someone that I had to do this. I had to appreciate the work of these people and not much more. Well, about the conference. We have this transnational perspective from the observatory. We've been applying it for 10 years now when we talk also about the uses of the past, memory policies and in this case with these more artistic view and more documentalistic and with these reflection of the underground legacy of these social and civil trauma and trauma that is very much related to the contemporary transmission through these different disciplines, through photography, archaeology, anthropology, even memorial tourism. Mr. Contel, who from the World of Associations has been organizing guided tours to the glacier, especially the Yaman Square for many years now. We'll talk about these in a couple of days, but always with this transnational perspective, this comparative perspective that helps us to better understand memorial processes and turning these memorial spaces into heritage. Oftentimes with jealousy, why not say it? We always compare ourselves with the French, English, German processes and we're jealous because here when we started a few years ago, many years ago and some of you in my team may remember, we visited shelters all over Catalonia with our helmets on because there were many problems when talking about victims, common graves, but it seemed like the memory in shelters was more positive, nice. Town councils of the entire political spectrum, because in Barcelona, for example, we had already rehabilitated shelter 307, but then we had better policies and actually we were already using pictures from that decade, from the year 2000 to 2011, the decade of remembrance and I don't know, maybe I'm being a little nostalgic, but it's true that it was one of the most important turning points, I would say, in the recovery of remnants from the war, bunkers, shelters, cemeteries, the first thing that we did was probably work on areas of shelters and there were thousands of projects or requests of projects, not all of them became true and we organized sessions to debate about what to do, we had dilemmas because every district, of course, wanted to rehabilitate the shelters for the city public and were able to visit them and we have architectural experts who will talk about them, they are very interesting spaces, they convey memory, they convey feelings and sensations in the original place which is also important and they are magnificent spaces for education and teaching for the youngness which is what we always worry about, those of us who are getting older we worry about how to convey all of these dilemmas and everything related to history and memory to schools and young people in contemporary societies, so without further ado I pass a farewell to my colleagues and friends and I hope their words will be interesting, they will not be their last words, it will be a starting point and yes, we will continue to debate and talk about these over the next couple of days and welcome all and thank you. Okay, now, welcome. I was going to say thank you too, I will not take too long because Giorgi said thank you to absolutely everyone but I was going to thank the department of memory of the town council for the work on the exhibit that will open on the 30th on the shelters, the archaeology service, the subsoil unit, the Catalan police who did a great job so that we could access many of the shelters that are difficult to access because of the lack of oxygen and material conditions are in, so I would like to thank all the stakeholders who have participated in making these sessions possible and of course the group and why today, why on March 16th 2023 are we all meeting here to talk about this because on March 16th, 85 years ago, a horrific telegram signed by the Italian dictator Mussolini was sent to the Major Collegian and said it was a telegram that announced something that had already happened. It had to happen on January 30th 1938 and a big symbol is the death of children there, which was the interpreter bombing. And bombings in which the civil population is not a collateral victim, it is the main target of the war. And this awful telegram by Mussolini, it led to the beginning of the most horrific bombings of the city of Barcelona in 1938. For 41 hours straight the city was bombed with the, of causing the complete fire merciless war, as Mussolini called it, to, in which people would know Italians not because of their capacity to smile and play mandolin but the capacity to have a great terror. These were absolutely horrific bombings. It was the first time in the Spanish Civil War in which the State Department of the United States published a note and they said this is unacceptable. This new warfare technique is absolutely unacceptable. It was the first time in which the Vatican reacted and asked Franco not to continue to act along those lines. So imagine the dimension of a phenomenon which was completely new back then and that would become absolutely usual later on. Even the ambassador of Nazi Germany sent a letter to Berlin saying maybe we're overdoing it. These in Nazi Germany. So imagine the dimension of a new type of war which was absolutely new at the time and which caused an international scandal which died down unfortunately. And Barcelona, the city of Barcelona in the new logic of total warfare which started in the First World War and reached its peak in the Second World War Barcelona was a key chapter of this development as was the reaction of citizens, the reaction of republican institutions and the citizens of Barcelona during this phenomenon. And this reaction basically is summarized in what was known in British debates as the Barcelona model. The Barcelona model of collective building of 1322 air raids that we have now in Barcelona. These were horrific days. Over 44 tons of bombs. Over 41 hours. And unfortunately 670 deaths due to the bombings. And let me say this between very many invaded commas. It was a low proportion as compared to the ferocity of the attack. And these is mainly due to the relative quality of the air raid shelters. And we're making a commemoration here that turns into a reflection as to why, to what end. At that time that was a shared European experience with Barcelona at the center on the debate of the building of shelters. The Barcelona model is present in the debate subsequently. It was a shared experience, a shared history both in terms of bombings and shelters did not become shared memory. It did not become shared memory basically because when most countries in Europe were waking up from the fascist nightmare, here the dark Franco-Rigim night was only just starting. So we were far from any memory debate, memory construction debate of the 30s and 40s. Not only in order to place Barcelona in the European context, but because we understand that the treatment, the historic treatment of memorials, archaeological treatment and memorial treatment of shelters strengthens us. Placing the case of Barcelona in the European context helps us also explain how this story unfolded in Europe and it also helps us understand ourselves and start a debate as to what to do with this memory. Jordi Guichet mentioned it very adequately. The memory of shelters is probably, well, when we, oftentimes when we talk about the Spanish Civil War, we talk about the events of May, ideological facts, but the great collective experience of the war is total warfare, the new experience of total warfare. The fact that the real war was as much in the war as the front line and in this collective experience of total warfare, there is a big, a colossal effort, collective effort, on head of before of building shelters, citizens' building shelters, institutions but also citizens' building shelters. So when we talk about this, we are talking about nodes, helps of one of the most collective experiences experienced in Barcelona back in the day of resistance against fascist attacks. And I hope we will be able to talk about the reconstruction of this memory and current and future uses of this memory. I guess it still works, yes. Okay, good morning everyone and thank you especially to those of you who come from afar. As many of you, I had contact with many of you over the past year, intense contact that has helped us build this exhibition that will open on March 30th here at La Moudelle, 1322. And as the members of the panel said, I wanted to remember some of the keys, some of the seeds of this project and these international sessions. A year ago, exactly a year ago, I was in London visiting shelters and then I went to Berlin and out of these travels I got a very sad feeling which was that abroad people knew Barcelona as a testbed of the Second World War and historians, activists, representatives of associations who managed this heritage abroad knew very clearly that Barcelona had been brutally bombed but very little people knew about the shelters and almost no one knew what the British parliament had dubbed as the Barcelona model. Almost no one knows the document Barcelona Lessons which is spectacular. It was written by a veteran commander of the First World War who was sent to Barcelona in April 1938, one month after the March attacks because the British government wanted to have a first-hand report in the field about what Republican Barcelona was doing and he drafted one of the most important documents on Catalan Passive Defence which was called Barcelona Lessons Advice for Local Authorities and Individual Citizens and that document which was the result of an intense debate at the beginnings of the Second World War 1938 and 1939 just like the statements of Ramón Pereira explaining this Barcelona model, these arid shelters, these community arid shelters built in a very specific manner that helped save thousands of lives in Barcelona. As Chabi said, that did not help generate a shared memory, a shared experience and now 85 years later we do not yet have this shared knowledge of for example what is being done in Germany, London, Barcelona. When I went to Berlin, Munich, Manchester, London, Paris, I tried to find out what they know about us and what they are doing now and these two questions are at the very foundation of these sessions because these sessions aim at placing Barcelona in the map of European memory shelters but also knowing what is being done with the Second World War heritage in other places in the world and it is surprising in London, you know there is a private initiative of planting crops in these shelters and there is a model to memorialize the institutional life of the government, war rooms, all of the shelters of the British government, it is so very interesting and what is being done in Berlin with contemporary art in bunkers or the Munich music school in Hitler's shelter, these initiatives also the memorialization in Paris with the Freedom Museum placed at the command center of the French resistance, these are initiatives that we don't know well here so we wanted to bring them closer to our territory and compare them to what we are doing and I wanted to add in all of this process that we have gone through for the exhibition that will open on March 30th, we have seen how historically invisible women are in shelter memory. I am sure you were not surprised by this but I wanted to share it because normally military heroes go on to be remembered in history, those responsible for active defense but it has been very difficult to find female names in Barcelona linked to the shelter heritage, we know in an inconsistent manner that they were part of the labor building the shelters but we know this in a very diffuse manner, we do not really know their stories, they are not in the pictures and I thought this was something that happened to us only but that is not the case, if you travel and if you try to find memories of women in European shelters they are not there, the memory of partisans, the neighbors, the brigadiers, the female brigadiers who built this heritage is not found in Europe either, the case of Paris is especially symptomatic, I do not know if you know who Cecile Role Tanguy was, she was a woman who wrote the cry for resistance and the liberation of Paris started with her and the shelter where she did that carries the name of her husband today and this happens in Paris, it happens here as well, we have tried to revert this situation, it is very difficult to find the female names and it continues to be absolutely anonymous and I hope you will be able to debate over the next couple of days about this and thank you very much. Okay, so thank you very much for all of your words, Barcelona was a pioneer in passive defence, it was a pioneer in the civil movement, the citizen movement and institutional self-protection movement and I would say that for decades the city of Barcelona has been a pioneer in the study and knowledge of its shelters and I wanted to mention the importance of the task of the archaeology service, for many years now they have been working in the research, in digging, disseminating, advising and we have managed to bring forward the website that we presented a few months ago where you can find all of the documented shelters to date and where we can even read the reports in some of them, in some of them we can even go on a 3D visit, Barcelona city of shelters is the name of the site, there are also now three additional videos of different dimensions of the shelters and during 2014 interventions have been made in shelters, archaeological interventions and some new ones have been discovered such as Pique Street, Bandayo Street, the Mercadal Square where shelters were accessed again and shortly we will be able to announce the rehabilitation of the Sagrada Tower shelter so there is a lot of work that doesn't end and doesn't stop by the archaeology service of documenting and cataloging all of these shelters, we have a lot of knowledge about everything that we have but we need more because in these sessions what we want to ask ourselves is also what now we have 1322 shelters documented, there may be more, we will have the opportunity to access more shelters but we know that many of them will never be open to the public due to security issues and what will we do, what have they done in other European cities, in what way have they rehabilitated and how can they be recovered for citizens, we need to map them to open websites, do we need to open more shelters to the public, we need to reflect and we need to do so with these international experiences and this is why these international sessions are so important because I have to set the path for these objects, these heritage, these memory objects that exist in our present, in our city, in our subsoil and that we need to be able to disseminate more and we need to see how to do that, this is what we have to ask ourselves and we have to mainly share experiences. These are sessions in which we have archaeologists, historians, other researchers, architects, activists for memory and many of these stories of our shelters would not have come to light with that neighborhood entities who have defended the protection of the heritage and then other institutions have walked in their footsteps and all of these entities must have a say too about how we want to tell the story of our neighborhoods, of our cities. These sessions aim at being a memorial heritage reflection of reflection on the cultural legacy represented by these shelters and also a more pragmatic reflection. What now? What do we do with all of these spaces now? Many of them will never be open to the public and whenever you announce that you've done rehabilitation work and when people know that there's a new shelter that has been opened up, people want to access it and it's difficult because of security issues but also oftentimes because they are not finished or they've been other over the decades, there are clear problems when you want to approach these shelters and oftentimes we need to give many explanations as to why they can't access them and this is something that we should talk about here too. We also have the exhibit and there will be two more books, the catalogue, the book on the website, the shelter website and we will have other objects that we will be able to hold in our hands on the website but what will we do when we are walking down the street and we know that there's a shelter under our feet? Should we mark them? Should we mark 1,322 shelters in the city of Barcelona? How to do that? These questions that I think will be addressed during the panels and tables and the town council, the culture department, the memory department, we will need to make decisions how to open them in what way, how to show them, how to explain them, how to mark them in the public space. So I would like to thank the organizers, thank you very much and next week on the 30th we encourage you to come to the opening of the exhibition and have a very fruitful couple of days. Thank you very much.