Interreligious Narratives and Contra‐Religious Aesthetics in the Material Culture of Navarra, Northern Spain

Abstract

Interreligious Narratives and Contra‐Religious Aesthetics in the Material Culture of Navarra, Northern Spain Daniel Moulin‐Stożek and Anna K. Dulska Introduction Material culture can contest religious narratives as much as it can constitute or support them. When the artist Abel Azcona exhibited a photograph of an installation of consecrated hosts spelling the word “Pederastia” (pederasty) in the Sala de Exposiciones (Exhibition room) in Pamplona's Monumento a Los Caídos (civil war memorial), it was met with uproar. Crowds of people gathered to protest this sacrilegious affront to their faith. In Phase One of the performance, Azcona surreptitiously smuggled 242 consecrated wafers from communion services, of which one video was uploaded on the Internet. Subsequently, he then arranged them to spell various provocative words on the floors of art galleries in Madrid (Phase Two). For Phase Three, photographs of these installations were exhibited in the neo‐classical memorial to the civil war nationalist commander, General Emilio Mola, that dominates the South‐Eastern quarter of Pamplona. Originally given the official title, Navarra a sus Muertos en la Cruzada (Navarra to its killed in the Crusade), the building, erected in 1942, is now controversial, like other Franquist victory monuments, because it immortalizes only the nationalist dead. Azcona's confrontational art is a striking example of how existing material culture can be used as a contextual foil for symbolic acts, and how art may represent, and rely upon, strong political positions for its meaning. The exhibition inverts the monument's original purpose by making the consecrated host spells out the profane. This also subverts the sensory experience of the host, by putting what should be placed on the tongue on the floor—in itself sacrilege. Representing a strand of Spanish anticlericalism, this act was intended to critique the power of the Church and expose its historic ties with the Franco regime, thereby attacking the conservative Catholic faith of much of the population of Navarra. This temporary installation is a powerful, if not extreme, illustration of interreligious aesthetics, or more specifically, contra‐religious aesthetics. Material culture may well follow, or innovate, according to artistic conventions that determine its visual and physical forms, but these aesthetic qualities are often invoked to subvert, contest, or sustain political power. Meanwhile, it intersects, in this case, with religious identity. If mythology serves to sustain religious and political identity in the face of detractors and competitors, material culture provides for the physical and sensory representation of mythologized narratives. Using Navarra as a paradigmatic and well‐defined microcosm, we explore further examples of Navarran material culture in order to consider the interreligious aesthetics of competition—the material manifestation of claims and vying counter‐claims. Our examples might not be as extreme or provocative as Azcona's performance, yet they comprise solid and enduring symbols in the public and visual history of Navarra, and, as such, are more representative. Our analysis of this material culture shows how symbolic exchange provides the means for self‐definition and contestation, which both represents political and religious positions, and at the same time produces a unique and rich material culture. We suggest that rather than posing a challenge to social harmony, competing claims and narratives represented in the aesthetics of art exhibitions, ritual practices, monuments, sacred sites, and museums enrich both art and society, providing the means by which religious identity may be defined, and giving impetus to the generation and regeneration of material culture in the process. Material culture and the creation of a collective identity Navarra, sometimes rendered Navarre in English, is an autonomous region of Spain which can trace its origins to the tenth‐century Kingdom of Pamplona (the present‐day capital of the region). The political, economic, and cultural distinctiveness of the region, which differs significantly from the other, even neighboring Spanish regions, is represented in various monuments and symbols. One prominent example is the monument to Los Fueros (“The privileges”), a statue, completed in 1903 and financed by what nowadays would be known as crowdfunding. This is situated in the heart of Pamplona and personifies the special rights of Navarra in relation to the Spanish state, representing its historical claims, including fiscal autonomy, dating back to the thirteenth...