The sky above the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona has experienced an unprecedented metamorphosis, transforming historical terror into pure artistic expression. On Saturday 20 June, at 8.30 pm, a helicopter flew over the surroundings of the Cathedral and Plaça Nova to give life to the famous “Bombing of Poems”.
It was not an attack, but an international public intervention carried out by members of the Chilean collective Casagrande, among which the figure of the promoter Julio Carrasco stands out. The aircraft released as many as 100,000 printed verses into the air in the form of bookmarks, allowing thousands of residents and passers-by to look up and pick up the works directly as they floated towards the ground. The goal declared by the organizers is to re-signify urban airspace, transforming a vehicle historically associated with destruction into a messenger of shared culture and beauty.
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The historical scars of Piazza Sant Felip Neri
The geographical choice of the overflight was not at all random, but linked to a specific desire to reactivate historical memory. Between 1937 and 1939, the Italian legionary air force hit the Catalan capital hard during the Spanish Civil War, dropping over a million kilos of explosives. The overall toll of that systematic offensive recorded 1,903 air attacks, causing more than 2,700 deaths and over 7,000 injuries.
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It was precisely the area of the Cathedral and the nearby Sant Felip Neri square that paid the highest price: on 30 January 1938 a fascist raid took the lives of 42 people, including twenty children who were seeking shelter. A few months later, a second wave of bombings lasting 41 hours generated hundreds more victims in the same district, leaving visible signs of shrapnel on the crumbling walls of the monuments.
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One hundred poets united in the sign of freedom
The event in Barcelona celebrated the tenth edition of Casagrande’s traveling project, which in the past has already visited other historic martyr cities such as Guernica, Warsaw, Berlin, London, Dubrovnik and Santiago de Chile. For this special stage, the collective has enlisted 50 Catalan poets and 50 Chilean poets, selected according to strict gender equality criteria and giving priority to authors under the age of 50.
The texts printed on the bookmarks, distributed in both Spanish and Catalan, offer a profound collective reflection on the concept of freedom and resistance, analyzing the traumas linked to exile and the silence of war. To preserve this artistic performance, all the compositions collected in the street by citizens will subsequently be cataloged and included in an official anthology publication, enriched by photographic images taken during the day.
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