Having been tricked by Power and humiliated by the arrogance of those who now wield it, the Pandavas are forced into exile even though they still harbor a desire for justice. They face twelve years of banishment in the wilderness, and a further year during which they must live in disguise and avoid being discovered. The Mahabharata, portrays this exile as a period of extreme hardship in which death is always present – but so is the growing awareness of its opposite. To abandon the palace and swap the city for nature also leads them to renew direct contact with life, embark on a search for knowledge, start a process of cleansing and strengthen the bond of brotherhood. Nevertheless, this strengthening seems to lead back towards war. Part two ends with the famous reflections of the Baghavad Gita in which Krishna responds to the doubts of Arjuna.

After the reflections from the Bhagavad Gita, the war begins: a tragedy that pits brother against brother and sucks up whole families, people of great courage. It is a war of devastating consequences, which does not just threaten the survival of one of the two sides, but the continuity of life on earth. “Even the blades of grass tremble in fear.” A battle in which the clashing sides do not hesitate to use the ultimate weapons. Vishnu himself exclaims: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This is a war that is also played out inside every human being.

The Mahabharata is one of the world’s greatest books. It is also the longest poem ever written. It was written in Sanskrit, and is about fifteen times the length of the Bible. “Maha” in Sanskrit means “great” or “complete”, “Bharata” is primarily the name of a legendary character, then that of a family or clan. So the title can be understood as “The Great history of the Bharatas”. However in a extended meaning “Bharata” can mean “Hindu”, and, even more generally “Man”. So the Mahabharata could be translated as “The Great history of Mankind”. According to most scholars, the events recounted in The Mahabharata probably have a historical source. Others maintain that the correct interpretation of the poem lies entirely in the direction of myth. Yet others point out the importance of the teaching books in the epic - political, social, moral and religious - and see The Mahabharata as a long treatise of government initiation “As far as we were concerned, this immense poem, which flows with the majesty of a great river, carries an inexhaustible richness which defies all structural, thematic, historic and psychological analysis. Doors are constantly opening which lead to other doors. It is impossible to hold the Mahabharata in the palm of your hand. Layers of subtext, sometimes contradictory, follow upon one another and are interwoven without losing the central theme. The theme is a threat: we live in a time of destruction - everything points in the same direction. Can this destruction be avoided?” Jean-Claude Carrière In our interview with Carrière, he talked about what he sees as the core of the Mahabharata: it is a poem on oblivion. Mankind seems to constantly forget the source of its true nature. Indian tradition says: “Everything in the Mahabharata is elsewhere. What it is not there is nowhere”. Part one, "The Game of Dice", shows us a growing confrontation between two sides battling for power. One side is clearly closer to the idea of dharma than the other, which barely bothers to respect it. To avoid direct hostilities, they decide to play a game of dice; but the game is rigged. Playing with power is a rigged game.

The Mahabharata is one of the world’s greatest books. It is also the longest poem written. It was written in Sanskrit, and is about fifteen times the length of the Bible. “Maha” in Sanskrit means “great” or “complete”, “Bharata” is primarily the name of a legendary character, and then that of a family or clan. So the title can be understood as “The Great history of the Bharatas”. However in an extended meaning “Bharata” can mean “Hindu”, and, even more generally “Man”. So the Mahabharata could be translated as “The Great history of Mankind”. According to most scholars, the events recounted in The Mahabharata probably have a historical source. Others maintain that the correct interpretation of the poem lies entirely in the direction of myth. Yet others point out the importance of the teaching books in the epic - political, social, moral and religious - and see The Mahabharata as a long treatise of government initiation. “As far as we were concerned, this immense poem, which flows with the majesty of a great river, carries an inexhaustible richness which defies all structural, thematic, historic or psychological analysis. Doors are constantly opening which lead to other doors. It is impossible to hold the Mahabharata in the palm of your hand. Layers of subtext, sometimes contradictory, follow upon one another and are interwoven without losing the central theme. The theme is a threat: we live in a time of destruction - everything points in the same direction. Can this destruction be avoided?” Jean-Claude Carrière. In our interview with Carrière, he pointed out what he thinks is the core of the Mahabarata: it is a poem on oblivion. Mankind seems to constantly forget the source of their truly nature. Indian tradition says: “Everything in the Mahabharata is elsewhere. What it is not there is nowhere”.

The precarious housing and employment conditions of the immigrant population in Barcelona's El Raval neighbourhood are simply a reflection of the conditions that our Spanish parents and grandparents - also migrants - experienced during the post-war period.

/ CONTEXT 1994 - 2020

This program in the form of an essay aims to shed light on some of the more disturbing aspects of contemporary life. Specifically, it looks at experiences involving conflict with power and at the imminent arrival of an even greater confrontation. A clash that exceeds the political realm and expands towards the notion of civilisation itself, and that seems to emanate from a source within the inner life of human beings.

Bearing this in mind, we present a series of screenings that look further than the immediacy of recent events, the logic of action-reaction, and the persistent notion of the other as intrinsically negative, in order to take a step back and observe from a distance that allows reflection.

We convey this vision through a programme with a dual core: La Commune by Peter Watkins, and The Mahabharata by Peter Brook, which we have contextualised with a series of documentaries and other documents that show contemporary expressions of the central theme.

La Commune offers a vision of contemporary conflict that transcends political oblivion. A cinematic reflection that looks back to a historical milestone – the emergence and disappearance of the 1871 Paris Commune and, at the same time, questions our own social reality and its representation in the media, given that Watkins chose to work with non-actors, people who express the actual conditions of their lives in Paris in 1999.

We will screen this film in three parts, each followed by a discussion session led by members of Rebond La Commune , the group that was created as a result of the making of this film.

Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata also deals with conflict but rather than taking a historical approach it positions itself outside of history, outside of linear time. It plays out in mythical time, the time of constant return and of the dialectic tension between the oblivion and remembrance of true human nature. The Mahabharata presents this conflict on several levels – linked to politics (power), civilisation, and the survival of life on Earth –, but also as an expression of the inner struggle that is fought out within every human being.

Each of the three parts of The Mahabharata will be preceded by excerpts from a conversation that we recorded with Jean-Claude Carrière, the screenwriter in charge of the theatrical adaptation of Brook's The Mahabharata , in which we explore the keys to this work in relation to the notions of conflict and oblivion.

This story is about you

The programme begins by following the course of the Mahabharata, an immense poem that flows with the majesty of a great river, which is full of “inexhaustible riches, defies all analysis, whether structural, thematic, historical or psychological. Doors are continually opening, which lead onto other doors. The Mahabharata cannot be held in the hollow of one’s hand. There are many ramifications. Sometimes seemingly contradictory, they succeed each other and intertwine, but we never lose the central theme of a looming threat, to which everything starkly points. We are living in a time of destruction. The question is, can we avoid it?” (1)

Against this background, from its very first lines, the Mahabharata takes us on an inner journey of knowledge and transformation.

• What is the poem about?

• It is about you. It is the story of your race. How your ancestors were born. How they grew. How vast war arose. It is the poetical history of mankind. If you listen carefully, at the end you will be someone else. (2)

  The illusion of power

The story gradually introduces us into a confrontation between the Pandava and the Kaurava . A confrontation that is a battle for power, although it arises from two almost opposite conceptions of life. With all their nuances and ambivalence, we see the Pandava proceed in accordance with their quest to fulfil the dharma , while the Kaurava seem to be guided only by desire and fear: the desire to possess power and the fear of losing it. They do not hesitate to use all possible means to achieve their end, they respect no limits whatsoever. And they act with the complicity of their parents, a blind king and a queen who voluntarily blindfolds herself.

Then the two sides play a game of dice, as a way of representing and temporarily avoiding direct conflict; but it is also a frame-up. The game is rigged – power play is always rigged. There can only be one outcome: defeat and the loss of everything they own, even their freedom. The Pandava face a future of exile and war.

In the present day, this rigged game takes on shapes and names that often hide its true purpose: to create a reality that is tailored to the private interests of a few. This is the case of so-called “free trade”, for example, which is supposedly a fair game in the sphere of economics. But the unequal terms of its participants and the non-reciprocal nature of the rules mean that it is inherently based on a desire for supremacy. Other examples disguise the obvious corporate and entrepreneurial nature of some social networks, and of many digital tools that barely hide their dark underside of control. And so we dwell in a realm of appearances: we appear to choose, we appear to communicate, we appear to be safe, thanks to a dense network of social devices. But inadvertently, when we comply with the daily ritual of submission to our work, to the educational and health system, to culture and to entertainment, we are signing a silent contract:

I accept competition as the foundation of our system, even though I am aware that it generates frustration and anger for the majority of those who lose. I agree to be humiliated and exploited in exchange for being allowed to humiliate and exploit those on a lower rung of the social pyramid (...)"

I accept that, in the name of peace, the largest Government expense will be Defence (...) I agree to be served up negative and terrifying news from around the world every day, so that I can ascertain the extent to which our situation is normal. (3)

Obviously, failure to sign “the contract” entails various increasing forms of exclusion. In view of this situation, protest can easily be channelled through the realm of appearance and made to give up its transformative power. But if protest tries to become real it will be stigmatised as sectarian, aggressive and violent, regardless of the means and ends it chooses.

Del Poder (“On Power”), the documentary by Zaván, focuses precisely on this aspect: the moment at which power reveals its true nature, beyond the fine names that it adopts to protect and legitimise its actions. This moment of revelation when power shows its true face comes about when it turns to the violence of repression. Genoa, 2001, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators protest on the streets. It is not an isolated event, the movement has been gaining strength, in Seattle in 1999, in Prague in 2000, and it is starting to represent a possibility for change… The “authorities” shield the city. They fence in entire neighbourhoods and suspend the Schengen treaty, to protect the summit of the heads of the world’s eight most powerful states. According to police trade union sources, they deliberately plan for a scenario of extreme violence, without ruling out the possibility that people may be killed (4). Police violence is unleashed, people are beaten indiscriminately. There are soon casualties, hundreds of them, some of people in comma. The situation quickly becomes a trap for the protesters, to such an extent that Amnesty International declares it “the greatest violation of human rights in Italy’s history since World War II.” Carlo Guiliani is killed by two shots to the head; the Commissioner who is tried for his murder is subsequently absolved. Far from reigning in the police violence, this death seems to stimulate it and give it its true meaning. The repression continues undiminished during the days that follow. De

5, 4, 3, 2, 1 In the dead silence of the morning, at 5 h 29 min 45 sec, the first atomic bomb exploded in a desert area of New Mexico known as La Jornada del Muerto. “We knew the world would never be the same. Few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the lines from the Bhagavad Gita (Mahabharata) in which Vishnu says: ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’” Oppenheimer (Director of the Manhattan (atomic research) project).    

We are now moving through a very bleak period in human history - where the convergence of postmodernist cynicism (eliminating humanistic and critical thinking from the education system), sheer greed engendered by the consumer society sweeping many people under its wing, human, economic and environmental catastrophe in the form of globalisation, massively increased suffering and exploitation of the people of the so-called Third World, as well as the mind-numbing conformity and standardization caused by the systematic audiovisualization of the planet have synergistically created a world where ethics, morality, human collectivity, and commitment (except to opportunism) are considered old fashioned. Where excess and economic exploitation have become the norm - to be taught even to children. In such a world as this, what happened in Paris in the spring of 1871 represented (and still represents) the idea of commitment to a struggle for a better world, and of the need for some form of collective social Utopia - which WE now need as desperately as dying people need plasma. The notion of a film showing this commitment was thus born.