Horror is a matter of perspective. You can pretend not to see, not to understand. You can close your eyes, but it is there: to remind you of cruelty, to carve furrows between indifference and conscience.

Guernica, Picasso’s famous painting, is the stark image of endless darkness: the horror of horrors, anguish, black and white. Looking today at photos of Gaza, even the color ones, what strikes you is the incredible resemblance to Guernica. Mothers have the same eyes, hands raised toward a sky that seems not to answer, the blast that erupts in the silence of us spectators who, as Picasso reminded Nazi soldiers, “you painted the Gaza painting yourselves”.

To think of rebuilding those images on a loom, in Sardinia, and reproducing them with raw wool, with a truly surprising effect, is an idea that leaves you speechless. Today, in Castelsardo, the exhibition Weaving peace was inaugurated: a tribute to Guernica, a magnificent work born from the creative direction of Pratha studio by Graziella Carta and, above all, from the tireless work of the women who, at the loom, spent five months of patient dedication to reproduce with incredible fidelity eight panels inspired by Picasso’s masterpiece.

As Intrecci culturali we took part in the opening of the exhibition, strongly desired by the Castelsardo association Michele Giua which, together with Pratha and Ammentos, wanted to stress the urgency and importance of “weaving peace”. There was talk of the Carta di s’Aspru, of the hope that those signatures can travel as far as Gaza, along with the awareness that Picasso’s painting and the beautiful orbace rugs that reinterpret it may become only works of art — and no longer terrible testimonies of authority and violence.

Horror really is a matter of perspective. Guernica was meant to be a warning against all wars. We still have much to learn, and we must find the courage to look at that painting and those orbace re-creations and be able to say, with strength and resolve: “We didn’t do it”.