Farewell to Gino Strada, founder of Emergency. Also many initiatives on art

Gino Strada, a physician and founder of Emergency, the humanitarian NGO that has been active since 1994 with the goal of providing free medical and surgical care to the needy around the world, particularly victims of war, conflict and poverty, passed away suddenly today at the age of 73. Sources close to the fmaily say this: the disappearance is due to complications related to heart problems from which Strada suffered.

From Milan, born in Sesto San Giovanni in 1948, Luigi, known as Gino, had graduated in medicine from Milan’s Statale University in 1978, specialized in emergency surgery, and, after working for several years at Rho Hospital and then in the United States at Stanford and Pittsburgh and then again at Harefield Hospital in the United Kingdom and Schuur Hospital in Cape Town Cape Town in South Africa, by 1989 he had worked with the Red Cross in some conflict zones (Pakistan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Bosnia and Herzegovina) becoming an expert in surgical treatment of war victims. His five years of experience in conflict theaters led him to the idea of founding Emergency together with a group of colleagues. For his activities (Emergency operates in 17 countries worldwide and has treated more than 11 million people), Gino Strada has won numerous awards including, in 2015, the Right Livelihood Award.

Emergency is also active in the field of art, and Gino Strada himself has often promoted the organization’s art initiatives. In 2017, Casa Emergency was opened in Milan, an exhibition space open to the city and intended for meetings, conferences and exhibitions: since then, several motres have taken place in the Milanese space, including Giulio Piscitelli’s solo exhibition on war photography, events for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the foundation, and the Senza Poesia exhibition with paintings and drawings to tell the story of migration. There was no shortage of public square initiatives such as Together for Art with which Emergency’s volunteers held fundraisers selling art gadgets, and then again collaborations with artists such as the one with cartoonist Gipi for the creation of t-shirts, or the one with photographer Giles Duley who visited Emergency’s hospital in Erbil to tell the world what the war in Iraq was like, and much more.

“Friends, as you may have seen my dad is gone,” daughter Cecilia Strada, currently engaged in a rescue operation on the Mediterranean, wrote on her FB page. “I can’t answer your many messages that I see coming because I am in the middle of the sea and we just had a rescue. I wasn’t with him, but of all the places I could have been...well, I was here with ResQ - People saving people saving lives. That’s what my father and mother taught me. I hug you all, hard, I’m close to you, and I’ll talk to you when we can.”

“No one saw this coming,” commented Rossella Miccio, president of Emergency, instead. “We are dazed and saddened. This is a huge loss for the whole world. He did everything to make the world better. He will be sorely missed.”

Farewell to Gino Strada, founder of Emergency. Also many initiatives on art

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