UNcovering Stories of Displacement and Hope

Abstract

Written by Begoña Echeverria and directed by Annika Speer, Picasso Presents Gernika explores the child refugee crisis resulting from Hitler’s 1937 bombing of the Basque town Gernika and Picasso’s artistic response, Guernica. The script weaves primary source material and documentation with imaginative fiction to consider the connections between war, art and human suffering. This article discusses our effort to bring more attention to the saga of the Basque children through theatre and to draw parallels between their plight and the circumstances of refugees world-wide. We relay the stories and emotional reactions that arose in response to our staged reading, Picasso Presents Gernika, at United Nations Headquarters in New York City on 20 June 2022, for World Refugee Day. Our event centred voices from and images of those most vulnerable and most often ignored in official accounts of war and displacement: children and women. The staged reading at the United Nations occurred four months into the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Given the crises in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria and the ongoing family separations on the US–Mexico border, the staged reading accompanied by remarks from representatives of United Nations High Commission for Refugees sought to highlight the political immediacy of the issues of invasion and displacement as well as the power of theatre to contribute empathically to the discourse.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Deep gratitude to everyone at the United Nations Headquarters for making this production possible: The UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, The European Union Delegation to the UN, Kelly Clements, Olof Skoog, Richard Towle, Dana Sleiman, Eunhye Lee and Jayashri Wyatt. Special thanks to actors Bella Merlin and Miles Anderson, to Fordham University theatre students Elian Rivera, Kana Seiki, Asa Nestlehutt and Grace Walworth, and to technical supervisor Hannah Hyatt.

Notes

1 The tapestry had been removed from the UN to be cleaned, but this information had not been communicated to those working in the UN or the broader public, hence the distressed responses around its initial disappearance and the relief when it was rehung.

2 All quotations from the live event can be found on the UN Web TV link (United Nations Media 2022).

3 Written work has a reference section; however, in our live productions we make a point of thanking the organizations that have been invaluable to the historiographic imagery incorporated within the production, including: The Association for the UK Basque Children (with gratitude to Carmen Kilner Sanchez), Claremont Colleges Library (Special Collections), Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa and Southworth Spanish Civil War Collection (University of California, San Diego).