… is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. Frederic Garcia Lorca
Convivencia, is a guide to a self-reflective study of the influence of interculturality on an artist’s artistic research and practice.
Why Convivencia? ‘Convivencia’ in English translates to ‘coexistence’, an obvious inevitability of human existence. We are not solitary beings and have evolved to no only coexist but to be interdependent on one another. The constant ebbs and flows of interculturality as a pre-condition to coexistence is the subject of this text, presented as a digital artist book.
Convivencia is also an academic term first put forward by the Spanish philologist Americo Castro to describe a period in history where the Moorish Iberian kingdoms, Muslims, Christians and Jews lived on the Iberian Peninsula during Medieval in intercultural harmony. (Alvarez, Lourdes María (2010). “Convivencia”. In Bjork, Robert E. (ed.). However, this narrative has been challenged by historians are representing and overly idealised recollection of the time. The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages. Oxford University Press.) (Fancy, H. (2019). “The new convivencia.” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 11(3), 295–305. https://doi.org/10.1080/17546559.2019.1605242) It is this friction, the friction between perceptions and myth-making across cultures, systems and times that is the subject of this text.
