Ilustrar, narrar y caminarla ciudad como huella arqueológica y como escritura de la memoria

Abstract

? ABSTRACT 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. This way, the city, understood as an unbreakable complex of different architectures and societies that inhabit them, constitutes a memory receptacle, whose essence can be seen as a subject of study for the disciplines of History and Archaeology, both approaching their research to the needs of a pluralistic society since the 60's. In this context, the artist takes a critical position and works around the archive and the archaeological trace in order to deal with oblivion. This PhD thesis arises from the need to build bridges between societies and their historical past, embedded in the Archaeological Heritage. We start from the hypothesis that the remembrance of the past as part of the present can be enhanced through the evocative power of the story in conjunction with the features of the physical space in which the historical events narrated are contextualized. This creates an enriched experience where reality and fiction intermix each other, objectiveness and subjectivity and, lastly, Institutional History and day-to-day stories. The theoretical aims are to establish the role that the artist performs as far as the active involvement of the citizen is concern when it comes the time to think about the past and to evaluate the tools available to link the historical narrative with the urban space. The practical aims converge in the concretion and materialization of an artistic project based on the results of the theoretical studies. The methodology used to back these theoretical foundations reflects the interdisciplinary approach of the present work. As far as the disciplines of History and Archaeology are concerned, we conduct a bibliographic review on the concepts of Memory and Public Archaeology as forms of involvement with today's society. Within Literature, we study, on the one hand, the many subtle kinds of interaction between words and images in picture books and, on the other hand, the literary tourism phenomenon, exploring the reasons why the reader is triggered by the need of travelling towards the different places where the narrated stories events are developed. The methodology used on the artistic project creation is both the interview and the fieldwork as a source of knowledge, besides the own way of design and illustration. The main results are, firstly, the definition of the concept of "Walking-picture book" as an artistic format whose main outcome is a picture book, and 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 a concrete project titled "Tahta al-zará. A dream under the earth", 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 main characters transferred to the city of the present. Its interpretation creates 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 already walked down trail. The timeline becomes undermined so as to intermix the individual stories, feelings and emotions with the spatial features of the space one passes through. Keywords Walking-picture book, Picture book, Archeology, History, Memory.