Ciutat Oberta
Installation views. Photos: Marta Garcia Cardellach.
Poesia i+ +info
The concept of an open city, especially in times of war, is a strategy by which civil and military authorities can declare that a city will surrender without fighting, trusting that in this way, useless attacks against the civilian population will be avoided and the historic-artistic heritage will be protected. It is a way of defending a city from bombing.
During the Civil War, Caldes d'Estrac, although not officially declared an open city, hosted numerous embassies and was protected from all bombings. Carlos Bunga's action seeks to unite the present with this memory of war. A city is much more than a piece of land; it is an ecosystem, it is collective memory, it is you and it is me. What we destroy in an armed conflict goes far beyond what we see.
Take a container, a flowerpot, a bottle of water, a bucket, a bowl, a cup or any container, fill it with water and freeze it to build one or several cities together. Let's make Rafah or Mariupol or Aleppo or Baghdad or Mosul or many others, one that has disappeared, and let's wait, without doing anything, until it melts and becomes invisible, until it dissolves into the sand and reaches the sea.
Photos: Marta Garcia Cardellach
2024. Barcelona, Spain.
