This year’s graphic image may seem excessively hard, near the knuckle, to some. However, this forceful approach reflects the need for FIRE!! to continue rattling cages, to keep on awakening consciences so that we do not relax, do not become too comfortable in our consumer, welfare societies. That would lead us to focus only on “us”, the local, events in our little world, forgetting that the vast majority of people on this planet do not enjoy even minimal guarantees of their rights as human beings. Not to mention the LGBT community which, besides its own problems, also has to deal with the stigma attached to it by many religions, reactionary policies and contexts in which there is no culture or education to help people to understand and respect difference.

Surprisingly, the rise in extremist movements in many countries in the West, added to social reversals and loss of rights in less developed societies, is generating, not a current of solidarity and struggle, but a return to the most ferocious individualism, to “everyone for themselves” or the bourgeois nihilism of “this doesn’t concern me”. We are still unable to see the human race in its entirety, to understand that each and every individual is a single subject of law, and that there is no border, economy, political system, religion or ideology that can justify discriminating against or diminishing the dignity of a human being.

This being the case, we will continue to fight for the globalisation of human rights, of all rights, for all people, without distinction on grounds of race, nationality, gender, sex, social status or way of thinking. One single person mistreated: all humanity with neither dignity nor justice.

Joako Ezpeleta, Co-director of Mostra FIRE!!