So that the memory does not fade
It is a constant mantra after every catastrophic event. This is how human history is forged, replete with events that are rife with carnage and utter disregard for human rights.
On the other hand, the acceleration and accumulation of such tragic events tends to blur the memory of these events more and more quickly. This is what both the exhibition of photographs by Ziv Koren and the screening of the documentary #Nova, presented at the Centro Cultural Galileo in Madrid, which will remain on show throughout the month of March, are trying to prevent.
More than a hundred guests, including several ambassadors and institutional representatives, attended the inauguration, enduring the expletives of several dozen demonstrators gathered outside the centre, all of them wearing the traditional Palestinian kufiya around their necks.
The event, presided over by the Israeli ambassador to Spain, Rodica Radian-Gordon, was attended by the author of the twenty-nine photographs that make up the exhibition, the photojournalist Ziv Koren, who recounted in abundant detail the confusion, the stupor and horror he felt and contemplated as he entered the scenes of the massacre carried out by Hamas terrorists on 7 October, in the early hours of the morning of which, coinciding with the Jewish holiday Simchat Torah, "hell broke loose when people and entire families were murdered, raped, burned and massacred in cold blood".
A text by Keren Goldstein Yehezkeli, entitled "When words run out", begins the tour of the exhibition, whose snapshots capture not only the immense trail of corpses that the terrorists left in their wake, but also emphasise the absence of the 239 hostages who were kidnapped and dragged into the tunnels that the organisation has dug in the Gaza Strip.
As for the documentary #Nova, it is a 55-minute film that uses exclusively time-lapse footage to recount the terrorists' attack on the crowd of young people from all over the world who were celebrating the Supernova electronic music festival in a fenced-in compound in the countryside just five kilometres from the Gaza border. There, Hamas claimed the lives of more than 300 people and abducted another 40.
The footage has been compiled from over two hundred videos taken by festival-goers themselves, many of whom managed to transmit the footage before they were killed. These images, almost all of which are exclusive, do not include any commentary, so that they capture in all their drama the horror experienced and suffered by the musicians and technicians or the simple young concert-goers, who were only thinking of having a good time, on a day that looked set to be radiant.
