The Grup de Recerca sobre Exclusió i Control Social (GRECS) and the Observatori de la Vida Quotidiana (OVQ), which are collaborating on the project “Strong Squares: the political beating of the heart of the city" present an intervention that takes participants on a documentary journey through the promised world of the information "freedom" that the Internet puts within our reach. In the tumultuous Arab social context of 2011, the Net emerged as one of most crucial tools for spreading information about the popular uprisings in different countries in the region. A year later, if we want to go back and follow the trail of those revolts, we simply type a keyword into a search engine and we are faced with millions of possibilities. But beyond this initial avalanche of data, what kind of information can we glean from this noisy, slippery magma? In this intervention we will explore how collective memory (and also forgetting) is shaped in a context such as this, through a search focusing on two uprisings that occurred almost simultaneously: the revolution in Cairo’s Tahrir Sqare, which received strong media coverage, and the citizen uprising in Tahrir Square, Baghdad, which was silenced in the press. By following this dual path, we will be able to experience the potential autonomy of the virtual world as a source of information independent of the mainstream media, and to consider the limitations of the Net as a scenario of and for social conflict. GRECS Research Group on Social Exclusion and Control. An interdisciplinary, international group of researchers that promotes critical reflection around the issues of social exclusion and control, based at the University of Barcelona. http://www.ub.edu/grecs/ OVQ: Observatory of Everyday Life. An assembly-based organisation of social researchers and visual arts professionals that carries out research on aspects of contemporary social life on the streets. http://www.ovq.cat

The Mahabharata is the epic poem of oblivion; of forgetting the source.

I don't think politicians have read any history at all, modern or ancient. Situations repeat themselves, and no matter how many guns they have, it will all be repeated again, because it will be necessary. Watch out world leaders, murderers like Mr Bush...this is a Barcelona you can't see; one that hides.

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).    

On May 27, 2011, police tried to evict the camp at Plaça Catalunya (Barcelona), which consisted of citizens exercising their right to freedom of assembly in a public space. The ensuing events in Barcelona became one of the most-documented cases of police brutality in recent history. They will also go down in history for the effective, exemplary and forceful non-violent response of the demonstrators. Following these events, a group of citizens filed a complaint reporting police abuse. But the judge closed the case without even hearing the complainants. This decision effectively left the claimants – and all citizens – utterly defenceless, and left the perpetrators of the serious events that took place on May 27 unpunished. It also created a dangerous precedent that is reminiscent of the impunity that existed in Spain during Franco’s dictatorship. #SOS27M Police impunity questions Spain’s democracy and justice system and calls for the support of the international community.

  “Because one must produce, one must by all possible means of activity replace nature wherever it can be replaced, one must find a major field of action for human inertia, the worker must have something to keep him busy, new fields of activity must be created, in which we shall see at last the reign of all the fake manufactured products, of all the vile synthetic substitutes in which beautiful real nature has no part, and must give way finally and shamefully before all the victorious substitute products (...)". Antonin Artaud.  

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.