A Metafiesta

A Metafiesta Text: Alex de las Heras Carballo.

Keywords: Fiesta in the public space, ritual stage, social behaviours, collective catharsis. The public space transforms ephemerally while a fiesta is taking place in it. An exciting, confusing and disorderly metamorphosis happens: the city landscape transmutes into a platform and a ritual stage where a extraordinary fluid of citizens and pedestrians come together, merge and march or accumulate in squares, streets, pavements and roads, celebrating and transgressing, transcending their daily life existence. A geographic accident happens, a territory redefines itself while different elements of the public space like a lamppost, a tree, a public art sculpture or a corner play an active and symbolicexpressive role along with the participants, the authorities, images and sounds, symbols, puppets or religious images on procession, flags, placards, chaotic screaming and cheerful music. Fiesta has the capacity to transfigure the public space into a stage for the creation and evocation of significance while transforming into real imagined situations, situations which allow urban societies to look into a magical mirror where they appear as a unified community, owner of its own space and time. Manuel Delgado (2000) describes this as the illusion of community. Nowadays a fiesta in the public space can happen for different motives as, for example, a conflict manifestation or its cushioning. It can function for proclaiming any personal or collective identity, for individuals to affirm who they are, who they want to be or even to forget it and nullify the identity, be stunned, be nobody and so to enjoy the possibilities of anonymity and of the mask. Fiesta (as an aesthetic-political practice where game, humour, the bodies, pleasure, dance, emotions, distances and the relation with the other participants has an active role) does not only arouse the suppressed, the latent and unrealized, it also reveals the weaves, adjustments and differences of society, as well as the system of negotiations which make it possible. A Metafiesta is, besides an essay, a series of talks and debates, happenings and performances, programmed and arbitrary. It is an event which speaks about itself giving meaning and significance to its occurrence while it happens. It is also an invitation both to individuals and collectives to take part, proclaim or celebrate their existence. It is an invitation to mutation, to come about oneself and look for new sensible parameters. Its learning method is its participation. One can attend it alone but the empathy, the rubbing with the bodies, the laughter and the fiesta itself, makes the experience something unforgettably collective, something cathartic; a purification, a liberation opportunity where one can come about, transform and maybe, eventually, transcend.

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