The Titanic tragedy was written during the early hours of April 14 to 15, 1912. The script of the story is well known: the liner collided with an iceberg during its maiden voyage and sank in just a few hours. The ship did not carry enough lifeboats for all the passengers and hundreds of them froze to death in the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean. The gigantic piece of ice played a leading role and is now one of the key pieces in the exhibition that the Basque company Musealia organizes in Washington. It will also be the same in the exhibition that will open this summer in Australia. The model of an iceberg four meters long and two meters high built by the Navarrese company Galván Frío Industrial will soon travel there, also by boat. It is a scale replica of the obstacle that sank the
Titanic
, created from the testimonies of the survivors of the tragedy. It works like an ice rink. Frozen water accumulates on its surface so that those who come to the exhibition can touch it and feel the cold that gripped those who perished in the sinking.
The idea came from Musealia, details Luis Ferreiro (San Sebastián, 41 years old), CEO of the company. They have been working for 25 years on various exhibitions around the world with which they aim to “tell complex stories, making them accessible through an audio guide and a specific museography.” They already have a replica of the iceberg in the Washington exhibition, but they wanted to go further, ensuring that visitors could feel, by touching it, "the cold around the body because the majority of the Titanic victims did not die from drowning, but from freezing." For this reason, they commissioned the Navarrese company to build a three-dimensional model that could be moved from one place to another easily and adapted to the voltages and electrical systems of different countries. Its CEO, Santiago Galván (Pamplona, 48 years old), does not hide that the proposal surprised them, but they got to work: "Technically we could do it, but artistically we did not know how."
They had a specialized company to prepare them, but the process has not been easy. Mainly because there are no real images of the real iceberg, Ferreiro details. Yes, there are photographs of some blocks of ice that were taken several hours before and after, but “no one can know for sure if they were those or not.” So they have relied, above all, on testimonies from survivors. “It was night and from when they saw the iceberg until they collided with it, 40 seconds passed. Then they leave him behind and he is lost in the darkness. You always have to take these descriptions a little with a grain of salt, but there are some drawings and testimonies from the investigation commission,” he explains. These statements suggest that this large mass was very similar to the Rock of Gibraltar. “There are two mounds and one a little higher than the other,” says Ferreiro. The refrigeration company has also been inspired by the somewhat flatter islet of Perejil to design the shape. After approving the plans, the most complicated part came: creating a system capable of generating ice in very diverse environments, adapting to the electrical and technological conditions of the different countries that the exhibition will visit.
Galván opted for the mechanism of an ice rink, which works thanks to “a machine, a chiller, through which a continuous stream of water descends at about ten degrees below zero”: “We transport that water through pipes inserted in the heart of the iceberg. The relative humidity of the environment inside the museum allows that humidity to remain adhered to the model and little by little the ice grows.” They estimate that it grows between two and three centimeters a day and that is what makes the model reach a final size of 4x2 meters, he explains. They are relevant dimensions because "it had to be as big as possible", but, at the same time, "it had to fit within certain measurements, both to put it on pallets and to put it inside maritime containers." The process had ups and downs. “We were commissioned to do it in March and we had a deadline of between three and four months, but halfway through the project we threw everything down because we didn't like it, so it took us four or five months. Initially there were going to be two or three people in the work team and in the end there were eight,” he details.
Currently, the model is ready to ship to Australia where the traveling exhibition on the
Titanic
is scheduled to open its doors in the summer. Between 150 and 200 original objects belonging to the passengers and crew can be seen, Ferreiro says. “There are rings, postcards, letters, life jackets, shoes... We have tried to select the objects knowing which passenger or crew member they belonged to. The idea is to tell the story from a human perspective, to know who were those who traveled and those who perished.”
Through these objects they also seek to help visitors understand the society of the time, to know what motivated those people to undertake such a long journey and, in the process, help destroy some myths that gained strength with James Cameron's film, starring Leonardo Dicaprio and Kate Winslet. For example, that those in third class were poor. "This is false. A trip in third class could cost the equivalent of renting an apartment for a low-middle class worker for an entire year. In 1912, if you were poor, you didn't travel, especially on the
Titanic
,” says Ferreiro. “It is also not proven that there were fences that separated passengers depending on the class in which they traveled, although it is known that they had to be separated, among other things, so that, in the event of diseases or infections, they could control the spread. ”. The exhibition will also do justice to the story of officer William McMaster Murdoch. “In the film he appears being bribed and killing a passenger. That is false. Murdoch was aware that the ship was sinking, that it did not have capacity for even half of the passengers it carried and that it filled the boats with children and women and then with men. In fact, 80% of the men who are saved owe their lives to Murdoch,” reveals Ferreiro. And he says goodbye with another unknown, were more women and children really saved than men? For now, the answer is on its way to Australia, the first stop of this new exhibition.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I am already a subscriber
_