Swimming against the current: Open Arms asserts its presence at the Palau Robert

BarcelonaWith the far right, the fake news And with hate speech spreading across Europe, the humanitarian rescue NGO Open Arms is hosting an exhibition at the Palau Robert in Barcelona. For ten years, they have saved 73,000 lives adrift at sea, putting their resources at the service of European institutions that have abdicated their legal and moral obligation to do everything possible to prevent anyone, regardless of their origin, from drowning. And not only do they let people die through negligence, but they have also dedicated themselves to persecuting and criminalizing the organizations that carry out this work. They persecute them with a message as false as it is absurd: that people risk their lives in a small boat simply because they "know" that someone on the other side is ready to rescue them. It doesn't matter that data, journalists, experts, and witnesses confirm that, in reality, the pull factor doesn't exist, that what drives people to move around the world is the hope of reaching a place where they will live better. And the idea that risking their lives for that is worthwhile.

The exhibition begins where the Open Arms story starts, in 2015: from a sofa, you can contemplate the photo of Alan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Syrian refugee boy, dead, face down, washed ashore by the waves on a Turkish beach. Oscar Camps, director and founder of the NGO, says that the most difficult step, and the one he is most proud of, was precisely "getting up from the sofa" when he saw it, spurred on by his daughter's question about why, if he was a lifeguard, he hadn't gone to help that child. From his sofa at home, he went to the Greek island of Lesbos, where Open Arms began carrying out rescues, with lifeguards using only their bare hands.

In the exhibition, you will find unique objects, such as the rope used by the ship Open Arms It towed tons of food to the Gaza coast, the only time they were able to reach it to alleviate the suffering of a population subjected to genocide. Or the life jackets used to secure people crammed into precarious boats, or the images of these extremely difficult and dangerous rescues, which sometimes succeed, but other times end in tragedy. Also, a glimpse into the work Open Arms has done on land, in our country during the pandemic or the DANA storm, in Ukraine, Syria, or Senegal, explaining to the young people who risk their lives on the deadly crossing.

And also explaining in Catalan schools and institutes that the alternative is not hatred or the far right. The tour ends with a carpet of tweets, with social media transformed into an echo chamber of hatred, like that of Santiago Abascal: "That slave ship must be confiscated and SINK." HeOpen Arms He will continue sailing against the current, hoping that one day the winds will change.