Project Detail: The Catalan heartbeat

Contest:

LuganoPhotoDays 2016



Brand:

LuganoPhotoDays



Author:

Joan Figueras

 

Project Info

The Catalan heartbeat

This project is about people who want to construct something big together. It is about Catalan culture, about vindicate our identity, about a will to touch the sky and go beyond our limits both in a artistic and political way. Castells or Human towers are constructions of people of all ages and genders built traditionally in festivals at many towns and villages all over Catalonia. The aim is to construct and deconstruct different kind of structures; depending on the difficulty it has a punctuation or another. But the Castells go much beyond competition.

In 2010 they were declared World Heritage of Humanity: "Human towers are recognized by Catalan people as an integral part of their cultural identity, transmitted from generation from generation and providing community members a sense of continuity, social cohesion and solidarity." The Unesco said.

Therefore, Human towers belong to everyone. The nature of this Catalan cultural activity relay on strength, balance, courage and good sense. But we can also see in it a mixture between tradition and modernity, effort and beauty, feeling of belonging but also integration. In fact, can human beings construct something big without these values? I do not think so.

We can not understand this artistic and cultural unique manifestation without linking it with the current moment that the region of Catalonia undergoes. A big majority of Catalan ask for the right to vote in order to decide their future, and the castells passion and effort are perfect to understand the essence of this phenomenon in Catalonia. Actually if you want to construct a new country one needs strength, balance, courage and good sense. The idea is that from the pictures one can feel the heartbeat, the human heartbeat, the Catalan heartbeat.

What I mainly want to show in this pictures are the strength of its protagonists, the balance of its constructions, the courage of the elderly and the little ones, and the good sense that surrounds the whole human towers world. But above all what I want to show is passion and emotion of this people. Indeed what I mainly see when I photography this folklore is not only Catalan culture but humanity in its essence.

Photos