Public space as a source of memories. The heritage of Madinat Mursiya through the walking-picture book

Throughout History, when a certain civilization conquered a city, it ended up adapting it to its own culture and traditions. Nonetheless, not all traces are erased, and so the coexistence between the past and the present can be materialized in an Archaeological Heritage that remains preserved and exposed to the citizen who walks through the public space.

Our aim is to create an artistic project whose purpose is to build bridges between societies and their historical past, embedded in the Archaeological Heritage. The hypothesis focuses on two main aspects. On the one hand, we conceive and value the city as a receptacle of memories, whose reading can provide valuable information about the layered History of a place. On the other hand, we study the features and possibilities of the picture book as an ideal support to present these memories in an attractive and evocative way to the citizen.

Starting from this symbiosis, firstly we define a new artistic format that we have coined as ‘walking picture book’ whose aim is to generate an experience based in the displacement of the reader through the physical space based on the guiding thread of a certain story. And secondly, its materialization in ‘Tahta al-zará. A dream under the earth’ walking-picture book, which is contextualized in the 13th century (end of the Muslim mandate in Madinat Mursiya) and works as an invitation to follow the footsteps of the characters transferred to the current city (Murcia, Spain). Its interpretation leads a double movement. The first displacement is the spacial one, carried out horizontally around the city. The second one is the temporal displacement, which is done vertically through the remembrance of the story based on the different spots of the walked down trail. The timeline becomes undermined and intermix the individual stories with the features of the space one passes through.

These results were presented at a meeting at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and Kyoto City University of Arts (Japan) for the research group of the project ‘Genealogy of ideas Genius loci and accumulation of collective memories in Europe. A Socio-religious history’.

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