Massive bombing of poems on the cathedral

BarcelonaThousands of people signed up for the bombing. Plaça Nova was packed like an egg at a quarter to nine in the evening, when a helicopter emerged from behind the spires of Barcelona Cathedral to drop a hundred thousand bookmarks with poems in defense of freedom. "How beautiful, to remember peace at a time of wars. To change aggressiveness and death, for poetry and peace," say Pedro and Maria Luisa, from L'Hospitalet, who did not leave over the weekend to see this unusual action.

Like them, people of all ages and styles – families, couples, tourists, groups of friends; mobiles up – ended up playing to catch bookmarks that were falling and fluttering. The bombing of poems aims to re-signify a place of memory that has no marble to put inscriptions on, such as the sky, which in the memory of some Barcelonians still remains as a space that terrorized the civilian population during the Civil War. Barcelona lived under bombs for two years. Between 1937 and 1939, the fascist aviation launched about 385 air attacks against the city, according to some sources. The number of victims is around 3,000 and more than 1,500 properties were destroyed, especially in Barceloneta and Ciutat Vella.

Isabel and Martín have come down from Vacarisses. “I think of my mother-in-law, who is 96 years old and lived through the Civil War. She went hungry a lot. Her family had a lingerie stall in the Sant Antoni Market and they had to trade things for potatoes. It got to the point where she was so thin that they had to take her out of Barcelona and bring her with other relatives,” she explains. Aina and Marina, two sisters aged 25 and 30 from Sants, saw the initiative on Instagram and have poked their noses in “out of curiosity” before going to dinner. There is also a shopkeeper who has had an establishment in the neighborhood for 40 years, one of the few antique dealers left. “Look, it’s funny. In such a dehumanized neighborhood as this...” she criticizes.

Raise your gaze

From the sky, poems written by fifty Chilean and fifty Catalan authors have been slowly falling, from Àngels Gregori to Xavier Mas Craviotto, including Antònia Vicens, Biel Mesquida, Anna Gual, Mireia Calafell, Carla Fajardo, among others. The collective promoting the initiative are the Chileans Casagrande, who address historical memory through art, poetry, and performance. In Catalonia, this intervention – which has previously taken place in nine cities that were targets of bombs, such as Santiago de Chile, Guernica, Berlin, Warsaw, London, Dubrovnik, or Madrid – is funded by the Ministry of Culture, to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of Francoism.

Among the audience is the poet Clara Fiol, one of those chosen, surprised by the success of the proposal: "I think it is a very transformative and reparative thing to talk about historical memory," she acknowledges. The helicopter continued to drop cards and the audience raised their arms to fight for the spoils. Just as a few days ago the sky was the protagonist of the consecration of the tower of Jesus of the Sagrada Família, this Saturday Barcelona has once again raised its gaze. And for those concerned about the cleaning: not a single paper reached the ground – but some did remain in the trees and on the roofs.