MemoriArtean IV: From Bilbao to Gernika. Paths of forgetting

This fourth exhibition, organised in collaboration between the Gernika Peace Museum and the MHLI (Historical Memory in Iberian Literature) research group, presents an installation by Verónica Domingo Alonso.

From Bilbao to Gernika. Paths of forgetting is a research and visual arts project in which art serves as a bridge for recovering the historical memory of Bizkaia.

In a region where time threatens to erase all trace of the Spanish Civil War, this exhibition seeks to transform events from our past into an aesthetic experience grounded in respect. The works are structured around a duality between the real and a memory that was never lived first-hand – inherited instead through the accounts of others – lending the narrative a layer of deeply personal subjectivity. This fusion enriches the viewer’s experience, allowing art to fill the gaps where historical records have been suppressed or destroyed, and restoring a presence to what time sought to obliterate.

The exhibition centres on air-raid shelters – spaces of passive defence – defined by a condition of systematic invisibility and neglect. The impulse to bring the hidden to light aims not only to shed light on these wartime
structures, but to draw a line of connection between past and present.