An installation by the Basque artist José Ibarrola will recreate for a week, at the headquarters of the European Parliament in Brussels, the climate of hatred and social oppression that existed in the Basque Country during the years of ETA to remember the suffocating social context in which the platform citizen Enough already! He opposed the terrorists and those who supported them with his silence.
“All societies turn the page, it is something therapeutic and it is good, but only if you have extracted the correct lessons”, Ibarrola commented at the press presentation of the work, accompanied by the MEP Maite Pagazaurtundúa (C’s), responsible for the initiative , designed to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the awarding of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought to ¡Basta ya! but that it was necessary to postpone due to the pandemic. “There is a silence in the families (…), there has been a lot of fear to speak even after the end of terrorism, it is a great pending issue. We must help to do pedagogy with young people, because the world of bullying continues to use children so that they see the terrorists as heroes for the fact that they were,” defends Pagaza.
The work, installed in one of the busiest areas of the Eurocámara, is entitled ‘The tunnel of hatred’ and is presented as “an immersive sensory experience”. Visitors, in small groups, enter a black container plunged into darkness. Noises begin to be heard, murmurs that become voices and shouts, aggressions and murderous orders. “Gora ETA militarra”, “ETA, kill them!”, is heard while targets projected on the walls appear. “A peephole that points at me, that points at me but makes everyone else afraid to get closer”, comments the Basque set designer.
The recording, created from sounds of acts of support for ETA or harassment of protesters in the 90s, lasts long enough for the visitor to feel for a few seconds that they want to run out of that space, that they want that to end once. It is at that moment that a short video is projected with excerpts from the speech of the philosopher Fernando Savater before the European Parliament when he received the Sakharov Prize in the name of ¡Basta Ya!, reflections that follow one another on images of ETA violence. The video closes with a few words from Pagazaurtundúa. The word is presented, in short, as the only possible way out of violence and “the dictatorship of silence of ETA”.
“In Basque poster terrorism it is necessary to remember what happened because the wounds are not completely closed and those who were engaged in the intimidation industry now use their knowledge to whitewash the past and this is not good for society. Moral shame is something We are talking about people who gave more importance to their ideas than to our lives when ETA killed and who now give more importance to their political desires than to reparation”, defended the Basque MEP, whose brother, Joseba Pagazaurtundúa was assassinated by ETA on February 8, 2003. It is estimated that the terrorist group, in its 40 years of existence, has killed 850 people, injured thousands more, and kidnapped 77 individuals.
The official inauguration of the artistic installation will take place tomorrow, and will be carried out by the president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, and members of Basque and Navarra civil society, including representatives of ¡Basta ya!, such as Savater. Ibarrola’s staging will be complemented by holding two debates. The first, “Threatened activism: escorts and escorts”, will include the participation of Cristina Cuesta, director of the Miguel Ángel Blanco Foundation; Mikel Iriondo, university professor and founder of the Ermua Forum and ¡Basta Ya!; Javier Nodar, former escort and general secretary of the Union of Civil Guards, and Jagoba Gutiérrez, member of ¡Basta Ya!.The second panel, ‘The art of the brave: ethics and aesthetics of ¡Basta Ya!’, will recall the visual aspect of the movement of the hand of Savater and artists like José Mari Alemán, Javier Mina or Ibarrola himself.
With the awarding of the prestigious Sakharov Prize to the Basque citizen platform in 2000, the European Parliament recognized for the first time the work for freedom of conscience within a member state of the European Union. It was a “special” recognition because the movement reacted against “a terribly intense dictatorship of fear and silence in the heart of democratic Europe,” says Maite Pagazaurtundúa, who warns of the “dynamics of normalization of ideological hatred” that are currently taking place in social networks and public discourse.
But “The Tunnel of Hate” aims to represent above all the universality of the struggle represented in the installation, whether it occurs in Euskadi, Belarus, Venezuela, China or Russia. “They are people who think of others, who face fear and discomfort and make the decision to commit themselves and fight for freedoms,” recalls the MEP. The Sakharov Prizes, he concluded, are “useful” because “they teach us, people who have dared to think about others in very harsh contexts (…), the value of having people overcome fear, make them stand up and fight for laws, freedom and pluralism”.