"The memory of oblivion", fifty years of Médecins Sans Frontières
"No single photograph can change fear, despair or poverty in the world. But the action of humanitarian organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières, accompanied by photographs, campaigns and publications in the mainstream media, can bring about that change". These are the words of the Brazilian Sebastiao Salgado, one of the great exponents of photojournalism, which he managed to elevate to the category of art, and one of the great models from which Juan Carlos Tomasi, from Barcelona, has drawn inspiration to compile and compile in a book, " The Memory of Oblivion", the first fifty years of the history of Médecins Sans Frontières, a pioneering non-governmental organisation in the pressing and increasingly necessary humanitarian work.
The book, which was presented at Casa Árabe by the author himself, together with the former president of MSF, Paula Farías, and the publisher Leopoldo Blume, is dedicated to the organisation's most recent victims: María Hernández Matas, Yohannes Halefom Reda and Tedros Gebremariam Gebremichael, the three murdered in Ethiopia in June 2021 while providing valuable aid to the people of Tigray, in the bloody civil war that this region is waging against the central power in Addis Ababa.
More than 150 photographs, taken over the past 25 years, make up this graphic account, which speaks of humanity, dignity, perseverance, empathy, a passion for portraying the light behind the darkness, and a passion for alleviating the suffering of others.
In addition to Salgado, the book includes a selection of texts by Laura Restrepo, Mar Padilla, Ricardo García Vilanova, Ramón Lobo, Anna Surinyach, Javier Sancho, Lola Hierro, Sergio Ramírez and Mario Vargas Llosa. All of them give personal testimony of their relationship with MSF, and the Spanish-Peruvian Nobel Prize winner acknowledges that he would never have been able to visit and tour the Congo without the cooperation of MSF workers, and thus carry out the immense fieldwork for one of his great novels, "The Dream of the Celt". It deals with the tragedy of the Congolese under the administration of Leopold II, to whom the Western powers gave this territory, eighteen times the size of Belgium, to which the monarch, whom Vargas Llosa describes as "history's first genocide", reigned.
The author of this photographic account, Juan Carlos Tomasi, confesses that the chance discovery of his camera, "my work tool that cost a fortune", after having left it in the Nou Camp car park, changed his destiny. And from then on, he realised that his obligation, in humanitarian media coverage, is "to show what we see with the intention of changing the course of rivers of injustice and suffering".
And, before saying goodbye, he concludes that he has "known, loved, cherished, felt and cried for many people over the years. That is the origin of these photographs, with which I try to tell, explain, feel many lives and their stories, trying to be coherent in my respect for the human".