Plan for the socio-cultural revaluation of the essence of the Camino de Santiago

WE ARE ON SAINT JAMES WAY, FOLLOW THE ROAD WITH US THROUGHOUT THE NETWORKS

Amazing travellers, what noble stories
We read in the deep oceans of your gaze!
Show us your memory's casket, and the glories
Streaming from gems made out of stars and rays!

We, too, would roam without a sail or steam,
And to combat the boredom of our jail,
Would stretch, like canvas on our souls, a dream,
Framed in horizons, of the seas you sail.

What have you seen?

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, THE VOYAGE, The Flowers of Evil.

The Saint James Way is probably the most international treasure we have in Spain and one of the most popular and cosmopolitan sacred routes on the planet.

Nowadays, this dualism is embodied by the contradiction of human heritage turned into a tourist attraction and making it coexist with the original magic of adventure and the spiritual.

However, although the Way has been walked with different meanings throughout the ages, we can still believe that its idiosyncrasy as a great journey of transformation and transcendence has survived until today.

Therefore, with the aim of saving and caring for its original and spiritual attributes, we propose to create a space for reflection, debate and artistic research about the cultural essence of the Camino de Santiago, affected in its aesthetic, environmental and social dimensions by the complex phenomena of the XXI century.

This cultural revaluation plan is the best way we have found to help the Camino to continue being a Grand Tour, a Journey to Ithaca, in which the light of the stars can continue enlightening and guiding the true seekers through the contemporary fog.

THE PLAN

The project was born as a new hope of La Maya Lab cultural workshop, whose goal is to revive the Iberian and Mediterranean cultural essences and to serve as a container for the oral traditions and knowledges, which now are endangered heritage.

Many entities with a rich experience in their field have joined our mission, and we couldn't imagine to have reached this point without them: The Ecological Refuge for Pilgrims Ave Fénix, the cultural manager Espacio de Arte / Espacio Abierto, the creative Coworking Space Codocóncodo, the Folclore Audiovisual producers, Berkori producers and the publishing company Chimenea y Manta.

The plan we present here is based practically on the realisation of

7 cultural proposals with a considerable artistic scope. Each one of them implies a deep research and a total immersion in the Way to rescue and safeguard its original values as an infallible antidote to the difficulties that challenge it today.

To carry out all this, a provisional Art Workshop has been hosted at the Ave Fénix Refuge in Villafranca del Bierzo in its different editions of 2019, 2020 and 2021 - the I, II and III Cultural Days of the Camino de Santiago and the VII, VIII and IX International Meetings of Visual Arts. The other initiatives hope to be managed before 2022.