When faced with war, its crimes against humanity and its genocides, what can an artist do? For some, it is showing these horrors directly, head-on, to make us react, depicting bodies that have been mangled, tortured, crushed and hanged, like Callot in his Great Miseries, Goya in his Disasters, Picasso in Guernica or Dix in The War (and countless ‘war’ photographers besides). Other artists have opted to evoke these crimes in a more indirect, less graphic, less brutal way, devoid of militant stances and pathos, yet imbued with just as much force: Mušič returning from Dachau, Fautrier and his Hostages, Jaar and his Real Pictures of the Rwandan genocide, Batniji and his fake housing ads. And this is the case here with Joana Villaverde.

She travelled to occupied Palestine for the first time in 2014, as if drawn there by a text by Suad Amiry, Animals’ Nightmare, which tells how animals, coming up against the separation barrier, the apartheid wall, are also prisoners in Palestine. In that story, the animals naively appeal to the US Vice-President Al Gore, lamenting that not even God comes to their aid. The artist went on to spend two months in Palestine; that summer, Israel killed more than 2,000 people in Gaza (a mere 2,000, one might say today, in the face of numbers 25, 50, 100 times greater. Yet still, 2,000, already a devastating toll, and more than half were women and children). What can one do, what can one say when faced with such barbarity, such staggering devastation? Bear witness, but how? Make it visible, bring together what is distant, render familiar what is foreign.

Perhaps, deep down, it all began with the landscapes: the hills, the rocks, the olive trees, the sheep, the sun, the dryness, the rhythm of life in the fields. Perhaps the first connection was this similarity between the landscapes of Palestine and those of the Alentejo, an almost visceral kinship. And then came a trigger: an old Peugeot 404 seen in Bethlehem, and an identical one abandoned in the streets of Avis.

Today, the Peugeot 404 stands there, in semi-darkness, immobilized, forbidden to travel like any ordinary Palestinian, yet dignified, laden with history, and fictitiously acculturated with a green license plate marked with the “P” of Palestine, another instrument of segregation.
A soft light illuminates the interior, and from it emerges a faint music, a Sufi religious invocation, improvised one evening by two residents of Jenin, Nabil Al Raee, artistic director of the renowned Freedom Theater, and his nephew Noor, and recorded by the artist. The sources of the light and sound are hidden, almost clandestine.

The car’s interior is filled with small zinc dustpans, the kind used to collect dust and garbage, two hundred perhaps, heaped together, tossed in great disorder.
Do we first think of the symbolism of refuse, of human beings considered less than nothing by the occupier, or even of those fragments of human bodies annihilated by bombs, carried away in trash bags? Do we think of the shovels used to dig through mass graves, to recover the dead, to bury them in improvised shrouds?

But the artist cannot stop at these immediate symbols: on each dustpan, she has reproduced a figure from Goya’s Disasters of War, most often human, but also animal, for they too are victims of oppression. All are subjected to contortions, torsions, distortions that seem beyond what any body could endure.
In his preparatory red-chalk drawings and in his 82 etchings, Goya depicted all the horror of Napoleonic persecution against his compatriots: emaciated, tortured, dismembered bodies that, sadly, have lost nothing of their relevance.
Rather than a direct representation of Palestinian reality, the artist, by passing through Goya, subtly situates it within a broader, more universal history: that of the struggles of the occupied against the occupier, of the resistant against the foreign oppressor.
Just as the Chapman brothers, in 2003, reworked a set of Goya’s prints to illustrate new Disasters, those of the war in Iraq, Joana Villaverde, in a less iconoclastic manner, rewrites Goya for an era and a place that have reinvented hell.

The installation occupies the entire room; one cannot pass by and glance at it distractedly. One is caught, like a wild animal in the headlights of the 404, there is no escape.
Almost everything here is metal: the iron of the car, the zinc of the dustpans.

Today, the wall still stands; humans and animals alike collide with it every day, and their territory is daily more occupied, more devastated, more diminished.
The Jenin camp, near which the artist recorded that music one evening, is destroyed, and Gaza is nothing but a field of ruins, uninhabitable, yet still inhabited by those who will never allow themselves to be driven out.
Today, Palestine is within each of us.
We are not, as Joana writes in her book, politicians, diplomats, historians, or academics: she is an artist, and I am a critic.
What can our role be in the face of catastrophe?
To never forget, to always bear witness, to accompany their resistance, their resilience, while never forgetting that it is theirs, not ours; that we are friends, but strangers.
And, for an artist, to give us images to see.

Today, in Gaza, images are suppressed, the press is forbidden, and our media spread the propaganda of the occupier.
We must speak, and we must show, against all odds.
We must not be silent.

Facing this catastrophe, facing this denial, Joana Villaverde stood up and said, “Yo lo vi”, the title of Goya’s 44th print.