Fuego y Saqueo

There are several theories about the emergence of the fallas festival, some point out that its origin can be traced back to the pagan celebration of the spring equinox and the harvesting of crops, as a ritual to call for prosperity and to ward off evil, from hands of the purifying fire. Given the inability to eradicate the tradition, the Catholic Church would have transformed it into the celebration of Saint Joseph's Day, other theories suggest that it originates from the tradition of carpenters who celebrated their patron by making bonfires in which they burned the leftovers and old belongings from carpentry through the use of a parot (a wooden pole that held a lamp), a practice that evolved; from dressing the parot to create characters from their environment, to the current ninots that burn in the Cremà. Today they are a festival declared as intangible heritage of humanity by UNESCO. During the four days of celebration, the city of Valencia becomes a place where a vast amalgam of cultural events meet, among which the main protagonists are pyrotechnics, parades, Fallas monuments, music and festival, all these acts of meeting respond to a sociability of a playful and artistic nature with the ephemeral monument as the center of a ritual of offering that is perpetuated over time and that largely preserves a spontaneity characteristic of the place, they seem to grant a moratorium that unleashes a discharge of enjoyment, liberation, disinhibition and excess, that added to the huge number of visitors, a double-edged sword that pits the local against the global, provoking a conflict in the public space in which the established norms are dissipate and alter the daily behavior of coexistence, and although in the end it is still inevitably crossed by the zeitgeist, it will culminate with the purification of the fire as a climax. In this essay, I seek to show the contagion of that spontaneity, which through the use of public space generates common spaces and conflicts.