BarcelonaWith the ultra-right, the fake news and hate speech spreading across Europe, the Open Arms humanitarian rescue movement is explained with an exhibition at the Palau Robert in Barcelona. Ten years in which they have saved 73,000 lives adrift, putting their resources at the service of European institutions that have resigned from their legal and moral obligation to do everything possible to prevent anyone, wherever they come from, from drowning at sea. And not only do they let people die by omission, but they have dedicated themselves to persecuting and criminalizing the organizations that do this work. They pursue them with a message as false as it is absurd: that people are risking their lives in a trap just because they “know” that someone on the other side is ready to rescue them. It doesn’t matter if data, journalists, experts and witnesses verify that, in reality, the appeal effect does not exist, that what makes people move around the world is the hope of reaching a place where they will live better. And the idea that to achieve it is worth risking your life.
The exhibition begins where the story of Open Arms begins, in 2015: from a couch you can see the photo of Alan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Syrian refugee boy, dead, with a mouth full of dirt, spat out by the waves on a beach in Turkey. Oscar Camps, director and founder of the oenagé, says that the most difficult step and of which he is most proud was precisely to have “got up from the sofa” when he saw her, spurred on by the words of his daughter who asked him why, if he was a rescuer, he had not gone to help that creature. From the couch at home, he planted himself on the Greek island of Lesvos, where Open Arms began carrying out rescues, with rescuers using their bare hands.
In the exhibition you will find unique objects, such as the rope with which the boat Open Arms towed tons of food to the coast of Gaza, the only time they could get there to alleviate the suffering of a population subjected to genocide. Or the vests with which they secure people trapped in precarious boats, or the images of these very difficult and dangerous rescues, which sometimes turn out well, but others end in tragedy. Also a sample of the work that Open Arms has done on the ground, at home with the pandemic or the Dana, in Ukraine, in Syria or in Senegal, explaining to young people what they are exposed to in the deadly travesty.
And also explaining to Catalan schools and institutes that the alternative is not hatred or the ultra-right. The tour ends with a carpet of tweets, with social networks turned into a sounding board for hatred, like that of Santiago Abascal: “That slave ship must be confiscated and SINK.” L’Open Arms he will continue to sail, against the current, in the hope that one day the winds will change.
