THIS SCHOOL IS IN RUINS

This School Is In Ruins is an interdisciplinary and collective artistic project developed together with Cristina González Martín and students in the Primary Education Teacher Training programme at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). The project investigates the relationship between violence, education, memory, textiles, and sound through a process of collective research and artistic production that culminates in an installation and a performative event.

The project begins with the recognition that, in armed conflicts, schools and educational infrastructures can also become targets of violence. Destroying a school means more than destroying a building: it attacks the right to education, childhood, memory, and the future of a community.

The project brings together data, images, and references to educational infrastructures destroyed in different conflicts and territories. Among the cases examined are the bombing of the Escola del Mar in Barcelona’s Barceloneta neighbourhood in 1938; the attack on the Bahr el-Baqar primary school in Egypt in 1970; the bombing of schools used as shelters in Gaza and Lebanon; and the attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ primary school in Iran. Together, these cases form an archive of memory that connects different historical and geographical contexts, revealing the persistence of violence against educational spaces.

The creative process also draws on photojournalism, particularly images documenting schools that have been destroyed, damaged, or reconstructed in contemporary conflicts. These images become research material and a starting point for exploring textiles as a form of memory, resistance, and reconstruction.

Through the intersection of archival research, photography, textile practices, and sound, This School Is In Ruins approaches the school as both a physical space and a symbolic structure. The project asks what remains when an educational space is destroyed, what can be reconstructed through collective practices, and how artistic processes can contribute to preserving the memory of places where education, childhood, and community have been disrupted by violence.