Bombing of Poems

The Bombing of Poems was a series of performances conducted over the period of nine years by the group Casagrande, in cities that had experienced aerial bombing in the past. This time cities like Santiago -Chille (2001)Dubrovnik (2002) Gernika(2004) Warsaw (2009) were bombed by helicopters with actual poems.

Here is a clip from the actual Bombing of Poems over Warsaw. One hundred thousand poems written by Chilean and Polish contemporary poets were printed in bookmarks in two languages, and were dropped over the Warsaw sky on the night of 11 August 2009.

Here is also the speech that Christobal Bianchi- member of the Casagrande- gave for the book launch "Bombings Poems over Warsow" at Goldsmiths University of London, 4th March 2010.

I was born a few months before the Government Palace La Moneda in Santiagode Chile was bombed on 11 September 1973 by the Chilean air force, under Augusto Pinochet’s command. The image of the airplanes soaring through Santiago and releasing their bombs over the governmental palace became the symbol of the beginning of a 17 year military dictatorship.

29 years later, in March 2001, in the context of an International Poetry Festival,a helicopter bombed the same building, but instead of missiles, poems were released over nine thousand people. This action related directly to our personal history in a particular moment of political change. The detention of General Pinochet in 1998 in London had brought the images of La Moneda palace in flames back to our TV screens once again. The country was in the midst of a transition to democracy, a process that had begun in 1990. The third democratic government opened the doors of the La Moneda Palace to the citizens after three decades. The new image, therefore, of the poems falling over the Palace provides us with an alternative picture to the military bombing of September 1973.

The first Bombing of Poems was more a process of discovery rather than design. Since it was not possible to rehearse the performance, the poetic and social aspects of the event were revealed in the moment of realisation on site. The particular way that the bookmarks fluttered and covered the sky at night; the speed of falling, the reactions of the crowd as people shared the poems; and the fact that after the performance there were no bookmarks left on the ground, were all crucial parts in this discovery. It also came to light that the date should not necessarily correspond with the commemoration of the military bombardment. The relation between the performance and a historical event is of a dislocated nature. Maintaining a distance to facts opens up the possibilities for the poetic gesture within the action.

In the same way, the sound effects of the aircraft over the palace illustrate the dichotomy of the helicopter. On the one hand, it projects a sense of threat and the impossibility of escaping the multi-directional and omnipresent war machine; on the other hand, conversely, the sense of rescue and freedom that comes from the sky and by this machine able to reach distant geographies. Therefore, between the forces of fear and threat, relief and freedom, the Bombing of Poems re-frames the audience and re-signifies space in a radical aperture of memory. The speed of the poems as they fell composed a moving image in the air and opened up a moment grounded not only in the streets, buildings and people, but also in the gaze of the sky as a space of remembrance. The conditions of the event were situated in this double recall: the historical event –the real bombing of the Palace – is interrupted by the inauguration of another moment which opens up a new space of sense and debate.

The decision to extend the Bombing of Poems to the international field was made a few months after the experience in Santiago. This decision was based on the strong reception of the performance by the citizens of Chile, and among us. We wanted to share this experience in other latitudes. Initially, we chose cities that had experienced air bombing without being military targets. Afterwards, we realized that the category of military target was arbitrary and blurred, because the air-bombardments were urgent acts within warfare designed to break the morale of the civil population by the indiscriminate production of rubble. The fact of coming from South-America was no less important. Even though our history was bound by struggles of independence of colonialism, indigena genocide and poverty, we had not experienced a total war or major military conflicts such as the ones that we know took place in the XX century. Maybe the absence of this latter experience made us believe that it was possible to realize the Bombing of Poems in the cities of Dubrovnik (2002), Gernika (2004) and Warsaw (2009). In the near future we are planning to realise the performance in Berlin, and hopefully to finish the project one day in Nagasaki, Japan.

I said “made us believe that it was possible” because over the last 9 years, experience has taught me that bombing cities with poems is a slow process that demands different types of effort: diplomacy, politics, institutional self censorship, bureaucracy, networking, curating and capacity to negotiate. These are crucial efforts needed to make understandable why a group of poets from a distant country like Chile want to drop poems in their city. The performance makes visible how our local stories become limits, which can only be universalised if we articulate a notion of the universal based on particularities.

An important tension is produced in between the series of cities that haven been chosen to hold a Bombing of Poems. While the Bombing of Poems might seem antagonistic in the face of a scarred city, its repetitive value places the previous destruction in the new context of a wide range of positions regarding their particular history and how this particularity became universalized in the process of juxtaposing them. For instance, the latter helps to elucidate how in the moment of making the first contact, to realize a Bombing of Poems in Belgrade (Serbia), the contact partnership was concerned not about the performance itself, but rather the fact that the project was already realized in 2002 in Dubrovnik (Croatia).

It is clear that a practice such as the Bombing of Poems faces controversies. However, what the place of this type of practice is in the cities concerned remains an open question. For example, a week after the realization of the performance in Gernika, whilst walking in the streets of the village, I asked a group of children about the event. They described witnessing not 1 but 4 and even 7 helicopters flying over the city, and how they ran to collect some of the bookmarks. But I also met survivors of the air-bombing of Gernika who were the same age as those children when the Condor Legion destroyed the city 1937. Listening to their testimony today makes clear how their lives were crossed by the trauma of witnessing the destruction of their village when they were just kids.

The question remains: How will the Bombing of Poems be remembered in the future by those children who were the same age as the survivors, but they witnessed an ephemeral event as opposed to a lasting trauma?

Among the many things that War transforms, language is not excluded. “War changes words”, as said by a character in a recent film about the rape of German women by the Red army at the end of the Second World War. War changes words in the sense that the symbolic structure of culture is dislocated to a point that victims and perpetrators must relate to a social reality that is radically different to the one before the conflict began. When a city is targeted by an air-bombing, not only are the urban geography and lives of its citizens destroyed, but the word of that given city is also dismantled. Thus, the air bombardment succeeds in its aim to defeat the morale of a society, since its symbols have become rubble. To me, for example, the image of La Moneda palace in flames is nothing other that the burning of books and the word of a society that was built by the socialist government in 1970. The rubble produces a void which in the case of Santiago de Chile was filled during 17 years of dictatorship by new political project.

A Bombing of Poems could be understood, therefore, as a gesture that seeks to fill a void and restore a missing word. As the intervention is symbolic, the missing word will remain lost and the found poems written by contemporary poets (who were not witnesses of the historical event), mobilize this act of hunting the missing word into the future.