The pandemic, from a citizens' perspective and as an opportunity for the future
La Model and the Montjuïc Castle are hosting an exhibition that will show a collection of 74 testimonies from Barcelona residents and which will be open to contributions from visitors.
What are your memories of the hardest months of the COVID-19 pandemic? When the lockdown began, the Barcelona City Council's Department of Democratic Memory launched a project aiming to compile memories of that exceptional moment. To this end, 74 Barcelona residents were interviewed, men and women who do not usually produce written or audiovisual accounts of their experiences. The result will be on display from 12 January at La Model in an exhibition entitled Memories of the pandemic. We will only come out of it together, a show on display at the former prison until 12 March and which will then be open to the public from 23 March to 31 December at Montjuïc Castle.
From the collected memories, a thematic selection of relevant issues has been made, which are presented in different areas of the exhibition: uncertainty, confinement, home, the idea of that which is essential, mobility, serving citizenship, mutual support, masks, screens, ageism, duels, celebrating, waves and curves, new normalities... These memories are displayed from words in a set of videos and accompanied by photographic images, large format in some cases, data, infographics and other resources, which help to build an interpretative framework. The exhibition aims to be a meeting point for a present under construction and also an opportunity to rethink the future. The proposal will have some unique spaces that will allow us to connect in other ways with these memories – through image, sound, reading, meditation and also participation: there will be a booth for collecting witnesses and a wall for leaving messages. The interviews with the 74 people will be deposited in the Municipal Archive of Barcelona and will also be available for consultation on barcelona.cat/memoriespandemia.
In parallel, on four Tuesdays in February, La Model will host a series of dialogues in a bid to reflect on questions that have been very present since the start of the pandemic, such as what collective responses we gave, how we got to that situation or how the city has changed in these two years. The dialogues will be attended by a plurality of profiles, both local and international.
More information can be found here.