Event
Exhibition «Living, living together and surviving: International Brigades and multilingualism»
The history of the Brigadas Internacionales can also be told through the words its members had to learn in order to understand one another. The exhibition «Living, living together and surviving: International Brigades and multilingualism» addresses a lesser-known facet of those volunteers who came from different countries to take part in the Guerra Civil Española.
About this event
The exhibition draws on the research of historians Ramon Naya Ortega and Lourdes Prades Artigas, from the Universidad de Barcelona, and examines how a community made up of people from very diverse languages and cultures managed to communicate in a context marked by urgency and conflict. Language learning and the fight against illiteracy appear here as fundamental tools for coexistence and everyday organisation.
Archive documents, memoirs and press produced by the brigadistas themselves, both at the front and in the rear, make it possible to reconstruct that reality from within. The materials reveal a pedagogical, cultural and deeply human dimension that is often left out of the military narrative.
«We speak different languages but the same tongue», the volunteers stated. The phrase sums up the focus of an exhibition that views war from an unexpected place: the need to understand the other.