Bombing of Poems is a public intervention conceived by the Chilean art collective Casagrande. It consists of dropping, from a helicopter, poems printed on bookmarks over cities that were targets of aerial bombings in the past. Through this gesture, the work proposes a symbolic resignification of the airspace: to transform the sky — within the frame of a historical event associated with violence and destruction — into a territory of memory, contemplation and encounter mediated by the written word.
On 20 June 2026, Barcelona joined the series of cities intervened by Casagrande. It was the tenth edition of the bombings of poems and took place around Barcelona Cathedral, in the heart of the Gothic Quarter, where historical memory, urban life and the vestiges of war converge.
Almost nine decades after the bombings that struck the city between 1937 and 1939, one hundred thousand poems written by one hundred contemporary poets — fifty Chilean and fifty Catalan — descended gently over Barcelona, inviting residents and passers-by to turn their gaze back to the sky, in a shared experience of reading, silence and common reflection.
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The hundred participating Catalan and Chilean poets
