Valencia

Yesterday with a shaking little plane run by the Valencian local government we flew over to Valencia. We had been invited by the local Polytechnic University to deliver a paper – in its never acceptable Spanish name intervención, and we really felt like WWI-interventionists while sitting over the rattling motor in the milky fog – about the electronic publications of Studiolum during the five days conference Imagen y Conocimiento – Tradición artística e innovación tecnológica. The young organizers welcomed us really warmly, introducing to us the most chic university clubs, while the audience interrogated us with keen interest, mostly about the sources and software background of our publications. However, I think it was the most useful for ourselves to have a quick overview of all the finished and ongoing projects of Studiolum. We ourselves were awed by seeing how many things we have already realized. Our confidence increased, and we look forward to the future with expectations.


We had also planned another program for Valencia. The complete corpus of Spanish emblem books to be published soon on DVD will also contain the album compiled by the Valencian notary Marco Antonio Ortí and published by the city in 1640 for the feasts celebrated on the 400th anniversary of the town’s reconquista from the Moors. This booklet described in detail the festive architecture and decoration of the procession embracing the whole city, so that the celebrators – who bought it or received it as a protocol gift before the feast – might clearly understand the complex allegorical program symbolizing the history of the city and the virtues of King James who reconquered it. We wanted to follow through the complete path of the procession guided by this description and by an illustrated map of Valencia contemporary with it, in order to display in photos its present condition which, if we disregard the decorations, has not changed much in respect to that of four hundred years ago.

Tomás Vincent Tosca, Map of Valencia (1704), detail representing the cathedral
and its environment. We will include the explanation of the
numbers in a following post, where we will
publicate the complete route
of the procession.

However, the long conversation and festive lunch following the intervenciones has not left much time to us. We only had an hour left before the departure of the plane to Mallorca. We could only walk round the cathedral and the main square, the one-time starting point of the procession. As a compensation, this time too they were making preparations for a large-scale feast of Mary. Choirs made rehearsal in the cathedral, a large crowd was gathering for the festive Mass of 6 o’clock, outside they were appending flower globes and preparing the procession and fireworks. Even if we could not follow through the ancient procession, we could at least feel its atmosphere.


Indeed, Valencia is a very lively city. Among others, it is full of very inventive contemporary buildings and public statues. There are for example the Roman walls unearthed near to the main square some meters under the street level, with water running on a glass plate above them, so that you can see through its trembling down at the past, a piece of Atlantis. Or there is the dry bed of the ancient river meandering through the city which has been completely transformed into a decorative garden, five meters under the level of city traffic, so that anyone could sink beneath for a while in the river of silence. In the many ideas of the same kind it is especially attractive how naturally and temperately they have been realized. In Austria every idea like this would be skinned seven times, drummed into you, and mercilessly transformed into a geg.


And something else: the boots. The girls, even in the hottest weather, wear high boots. I have not seen such thing anywhere else in Spain, only in Italy. There, however, boots are made of precious fine skins of natural color, while here they attract your attention with the most varied colors from the zoologically impossible predatory patterns to the unambiguous tones of moulded plastic. It is strange, but they do not look bad in the foreground of experimental architecture and contemporary plastic art.