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Gernika / Guernica. Anita Glesta

Gernika / Guernica. Anita Glesta

From the window of my bedroom on the 32nd floor, facing the World Trade Center, I watched the first plane crash into the building on 11 September. I rushed to rescue my children from the school below the towers, trying to shield them from the horror of what they were seeing as we fled down West Street.

A few months later, as we moved around the city between various flats, since our flat in the city centre had been contaminated, I couldn’t stop thinking about my personal experience of living in northern Spain as a teenager in the 1970s.

I thought of Picasso’s great painting and what it meant to make art in such terrible times, particularly in the context of a monument, but more generally what it means to create images of atrocity when it surrounds us so much. And, I wondered, what remained of the town of Gernika itself?

As I hadn’t lived in Spain for nearly 30 years and was no longer in touch with the family I’d lived with during that time, I sent a message in a bottle and wrote an anonymous letter to an email address, gernika.com. I explained who I was and asked whoever was on

the other end if any fragments of the bomb remained in the town. I wondered what memorials existed in the town sixty-five years after the first aerial bombardment, which changed the world as it was known at the time.

The next day I received a reply from María Oinaguren, director of the Gernika Peace Organisation, Gernika Gogoratuz, who told me: “We’ve been waiting for you…”.

Date

September 2007

Category

Art and Peace, Memory