It’s not easy to believe,
in the streets at night.
When the moon lights up the cold
it’s not so easy to become peaceful,
when the crickets chirp and the pot echoes
and the stomach shrinks
like a malnourished little animal.
It isn’t easy to be harmonious in the resounding anonymity of misery.
It isn’t so easy to meditate between barbed wire, blood and screams.
But the third world, of the first world and of the second and of the third,
is fed up eating hunger and swallowing love.
It isn’t so difficult to understand:
peace is also love,
love is also struggle,
and the faith that moves mountains
is not the one of the tea room talks,
nor the one of the absurd speeches
of universal happiness remedies sellers.
It’s the faith of the crowd
that goes out of its place of still mass and takes out its hope
with the fierceness of wolves
and even knowing their force may not be useful against governments;
and even so:
they go out to die.

Montse Lopez Muley Abdhalha
(MUSSIA)

Translator’s note: original poem written in Spanish. Translated with the sole purpose of conveying its general meaning.

Upon hearing the song, I felt anger and fury. The last sentence is overwhelming: “and even so, they go out to die”. Because they will die anyway. They have no other choice. This final part of the poem is a punch that leaves you speechless.

      Pondering, I came up with the concept of “fight for survival”. The most daily battle to survive is to get food. Suddenly, a cruel situation came to my mind. A large starving refugee camp. A  helicopter  loaded with food approaches. Everyone runs and swirls below where the helicopter will throw something to eat. Some climb over others to catch the scarce food, while others die asphyxiated by the pressure of the human mass. Bread falls from the helicopter. Hysteria breaks out. Better not even look at what happens next. Suddenly a bloody fist raises up taking one of the loaves. Photograph of the fist. That is the image of the struggle for survival that came to my mind to illustrate this theme.

      I focused the visual style towards a propaganda icon or symbol. The fist that appears in the photograph belongs to Joan Pocurull, from Mussia.

      Months after the publication of the cover on the networks, this photo was used to carry out a campaign to support Catalan political prisoners, who had started a hunger strike against Spanish government.

                                                                                                         Jordi Roca Zanuy