The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) requires nearly $60m to provide critical support, including emergency cash assistance, food, temporary shelter, and specialised services for vulnerable groups such as female-headed households, people with disabilities, and children.
From there, the team went on to work with Bolivian and Korean communities in Brazil to tell their stories of migration, before partnering with Barcelona’s city council to document local memories. The sessions were open to the public and held last summer at the Design Museum in Barcelona, generating more than 300 memories.Some wanted to work through traumatic experiences, like one woman who was abused by a relative who avoided jail and wanted to recreate a memory of him in court to share with her family. Others recalled moments from their childhood, like 105-year-old Pepita, who recreated the day she saw a train for the first time. Couples came to relive shared experiences.
There was always a moment, Ainoa Pubill Unzeta, who carried out interviews in Barcelona, says, “when people actually saw a picture that they would relate to, you could feel it … you can see it”. For some, it was just a smile; others cried. For her, this was confirmation that the image was done well.One of the first memories Garcia recorded during their pilot sessions was that of Carmen, now in her 90s. She remembers going up to a stranger’s balcony as a child, her mother having paid the owners to let them in, because it looked into the courtyard of the jail where her father, a doctor for the Republican front during the Spanish Civil War, was being held. This was the only way the family could see him from his cell window.By incredible coincidence, Carmen’s son was employed in the same prison as a social worker decades later, but neither son nor mother knew that. When the whole family came to see an installation at the Public Office of Synthetic Memories last year, her son recognised the prison immediately from his mother’s reconstruction. “It was a kind of closing the loop … it was beautiful,” Garcia says.
Clandestine assembliesThe team was particularly interested in telling stories of civic activists who have played a key role in different social movements in the city over the last 50 years, including those concerning LGBTQ and workers’ rights. While initially the focus was not on the dictatorship era, it “naturally brought us to engage with people who, by the historical circumstances, were activists against the regime,” Dordas explains.
One of them was 74-year-old Jose Carles Vallejo Calderon.
Born in Barcelona in 1950 to Republican parents who faced oppression underIn recent months, there have also been signs that Trump plans to once again tighten the screws on the Cuban government, in a return to the “maximum pressure” campaigns that typified foreign policy during his first term.
In February, for instance, the Trump administration announced it wouldfrom anyone who works with Cuba’s medical system, which sends thousands of healthcare workers abroad each year, particularly in the Caribbean region.
Critics have criticised the healthcare programme for its low pay and hefty restrictions on its employees. Trump and Rubio, meanwhile, have claimed the medical system amounts to a form of “” that enriches the Cuban government. But leaders in Havana have denied that allegation.