Dedication

If your eyes see it,
it’s true, it has been true.

To words, so they always honor
the memory of those who are not among us anymore.

Visual chronicle of a resilient city

Ada Colau Ballano
Mayor of Barcelona

Umberto Eco said that the mission of creators is to establish a new order: “Some say the world is repetitive, and others that it is always surprising and different.” The visual chronicle that you have in your hands is an artifact of personal memory, which over the years will become an artifact of collective memory.

This photographic diary of Jordi Panyella documents our confined city and seeks the surprising and distinct where most only see a lack of movement. You will find not only a registration of empty streets, closed shops, and messages of hope, but also the living memory of this Spring of 2020, when the city and the world stopped.

This confinement and its challenges are not the first setback faced by the city, which has managed to recover from complicated situations before: fascist bombings, hunger and misery during the war, and more recently the collapse of a tunnel in El Carmel and the terrorist attacks in La Rambla.

The resilience capacity of this city is the resilience capacity of its people, who even in the worst moments goes ahead and always puts their eye on the future. In this sense, the Covid-19 has taken many things from us, and certainly the most painful one was being unable to say goodbye to our departed neighbors, families and friends who have died during this period.

But we were also given the opportunity to stop and slow down. To reflect on everything that does not work, everything that we want better. Now that Barcelona, and slowly the world too, open to new life, the responsibility is ours: we must live up to these lessons we learned, we must give the best of us, we must accelerate the changes that will make this transformation possible, and we must do all of this as the residents of this resilient and fighting city. We will learn from this experience, and take care of each other. Only then will move forward.

Out of silence, images

Jordi Panyella
Barcelona, Spring 2020