UNcovering Stories of Displacement and Hope

Abstract

Written by Begoña Echeverria and directed by Annika Speer, Picasso Presents Gernika explores the child refugee crisis resulting from Hitler’s 1937 bombing of the Basque town Gernika and Picasso’s artistic response, Guernica. The script weaves primary source material and documentation with imaginative fiction to consider the connections between war, art and human suffering. This article discusses our effort to bring more attention to the saga of the Basque children through theatre and to draw parallels between their plight and the circumstances of refugees world-wide. We relay the stories and emotional reactions that arose in response to our staged reading, Picasso Presents Gernika, at United Nations Headquarters in New York City on 20 June 2022, for World Refugee Day. Our event centred voices from and images of those most vulnerable and most often ignored in official accounts of war and displacement: children and women. The staged reading at the United Nations occurred four months into the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Given the crises in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria and the ongoing family separations on the US–Mexico border, the staged reading accompanied by remarks from representatives of United Nations High Commission for Refugees sought to highlight the political immediacy of the issues of invasion and displacement as well as the power of theatre to contribute empathically to the discourse.