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underground. Interestingly, these projects have influenced my life.
The first of these was the Castilla-La Mancha Science Museum in
Cuenca. I was responsible for the design team. This museum has
an area dedicated to palaeontology, more specifically the Las Hoyas
find and its main jewel: the Iberomesornis Romeralis, which boasts
my wife’s last name, because it was her uncle who found it. A few
years later, I decided to move to that city.
The second of these projects linked to underground worlds was
the Archeological Museum in Alicante, known as MARQ - by
the way, this museum earned the 2004 EMYA Award as the Best
Museum in Europe. I worked on the first phase of this project, and
it was exciting to see the final results. It was here that I realized that
my career goal was to become a “shaman.” What is a shaman? Well,
if we take a look at the Wikipedia, it is defined a mediator who is
said to be able to alter reality or collective perception so that it fails
to respond to causal logic.
But, what is reality? We live in an era of images. Thousands and
thousands of images travel along information and communication
channels. Mass society has converted images into its “own reality,”
into its own “truth.” Internet and the digital era have allowed us
to learn about the world, the micro world and the macro world by
means of representation, through its image. Images have substituted
the actual reality they represent. People take over objects and scenery
through images, which they collect compulsively. We re-live
memories in the form of images more that true reality.
In 1936, Walter Benjamin, in the essay The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction, wrote: “We define the aura of the latter
as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.”
The distance Benjamin is talking about has no measure and is insurmountable.
However, individuals within mass society have sought
to eliminate this distance by taking over the image or scenery; and
destroying its aura...
Move away from the object, in other words, make it sacred once
again... this is the mission of the “shaman”; then, he must become
the mediator to intercede between the community and the spirits.
Recuperate that aura, the soul that both the objects and places had in
times past - return them to their true reality by means of their presence
and create a language that allows us to understand their message...
that is the mission of an ex-designer turned shaman. The museum is
its temple, its sacred resting place where the ritual is held; the ritual
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