Barcelona was the first city in the world to be bombarded against the population during the Civil War. In practically two years, the German and Italian armies crushed the city as if two hands were tearing thirteen thousand kilometers of blackened cloth in the sky.
Eight decades later, under our feet more than twenty kilometers of tunnels with 1,322 inventoried shelters that the city was weaving during the attacks of 1937 are preserved. A unique civil heritage that keeps alive the scar of the last war lived in the city, which now will be immortalized in La Modelo in the photographic exhibition 1,322.
Galleries 3 and 4 of the old prison will host, from this Thursday until July 31, 170 photographs that will summarize the investigation of the photographer, Ana Sánchez, and the historian, Xavier Domènech, where they have documented 400 of the 1,300 shelters barcelonians “The spirit of our project is to reopen and share, after eight decades, these confined and difficult-to-access spaces,” explains the photographer.
Among the 40 underground relics on display, each one in a different cell, unprecedented shelters will come to the surface for the first time, such as the one at the headquarters of the Junta de Defensa Pasiva, located on Paseo de Gràcia, the one at the Popular War School , located at the Escuelas Pías de Sarrià, or that of the Damm factory.
The exhibition will also show, as a novelty, around fifty objects found during archaeological interventions.
A good number of private shelters have also resurfaced from the underground “thanks to the help of the neighbors, who have opened the doors for us to be able to photograph them,” says Sánchez. These are mostly unknown spaces that do not appear in any census, unlike community or political shelters, and many of them have fallen into oblivion, even from family memory.
“The first time I went down I tried to think how a 40-year-old mother would feel when the bombs suddenly start to fall and she has the children at school,” Sánchez details. The photographer herself entered a shelter for the first time in 2007. Years later she decided to promote this project to materialize life under the bombs, a symbol of resistance.
Accessing these confined spaces after eight decades brought many difficulties, from finding a new entrance to surviving the toxic gases and lack of oxygen. “With the documentation I had an idea of ??what I would find, but when you are inside the refuge it is not as you imagine. Each one is a surprise and being there is a unique and transformative experience”
