Fréscano joins the Territorio Mudéjar network with an exhibition and a welcome speech

The temporary exhibition “Mudejar, the intelligence of beauty. 20th Anniversary World Heritage” arrives in Fréscano. This travelling exhibition commemorates the 20th anniversary of UNESCO World Heritage and will travel around our territory in the coming months. In Fréscano, it can be seen until 12 August from 18.30 to 20.00.

On the occasion of the exhibition and the incorporation of Fréscano to the Territorio Mudéjar network, during the weekend we will also make a presentation for all the inhabitants to know what it means to be part of the Territorio Mudéjar network and for them to get involved in our projects.

On Saturday 7th at 18.30 we will have a lecture on “Fréscano, Mudejar landscape” in the chapel of Nuestra Señora de la Huerta by Victoria E. Trasobares Ruiz, director of Territorio Mudéjar. The activity is free of charge.

Territorio Mudéjar returns to CortonaOpen3D

Territorio Mudéjar participates one more year in the workshop of the Polytechnic of Milan and the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera: CortonaOpen3D. This is a course specialising in “SmartCityDesign” (smart city design) in a Cultural Heritage context and will be held from 1 to 10 August in the Italian town of #Cortona (in the province of Arezzo, Tuscany). Due to the health situation, there will be a combination of face-to-face and online training.

The workshop lasts approximately 100 hours divided between classroom lessons, lectures and project workshops in which between 50 and 100 international students participate. In this meeting, the participants develop a SmartCityDesigns project within the city of Cortona.

In this framework, Victoria E. Trasobares Ruiz, director of Territorio Mudéjar, will be one of the invited specialists. Her conference will focus on: “Territorio Mudéjar, a strategic example of heritage management: the project behind the projects”, as an example of innovative management of historical and artistic heritage in rural areas.

The director of Territorio Mudéjar will give this lesson from #Tobed (Zaragoza) through the digital platform set up for the workshop. It will also be the starting point of the many and varied activities to which the internship students of the #ChallengeProgramme 2021, the initiative financed by the Council of Zaragoza and managed through Universa, the Guidance and Employment Service of the University of Zaragoza, will be able to attend.

Promotional and dissemination actions in Belchite

We continue to publicise Territorio Mudéjar and Mudejar heritage through our entity’s dissemination and communication actions. We have been in the Cultural Association El Allondero de Belchite where we talked about the importance of creating networks in rural areas and of counting on the inhabitants of our villages, thus advancing in our mission to strengthen a unified and collaborative management network for the use of historical-artistic resources linked to the important Mudejar heritage, understanding them as an engine of development of the villages and as an element of identity for the maintenance of the communities that make up our territory.

Travelling exhibition Mudejar 20th Anniversary World Heritage Site

The temporary and itinerant exhibition Mudejar 20th Anniversary World Heritage is already touring our Territorio Mudéjar. It will be inaugurated on 21 July in Ricla and can be visited until the end of the year in the different partner towns of Territorio Mudéjar. It is part of the commemorative events we are celebrating on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the declaration of the Zaragoza Mudejar as World Heritage.

Those interested will find intelligent signposting and an exhibition focused on in situ learning for all audiences.

The first place where the exhibition will be on display is Ricla and it can be visited in the old consulting room of the strait (Doña Clara street, nº 12) from 18.00 to 20.00 until Sunday 27th. We will keep you informed about the next venues.

The exhibition project has been made possible thanks to the collaboration of Adri Calatayud-Aranda and the Leader grants from the Aragon Rural Development Programme 2014-2020.

As we have told you on other occasions, we work with Adri Calatayud Aranda on different projects. Specifically, within the “Asociación Territorio Mudéjar Centro de Innovacion rural” we have worked on the signposting and the itinerant dissemination by means of mobile boards of the recently inaugurated exhibition.

Territorio Mudéjar, a centre for rural innovation

The Association for the Integral Rural Development of the Community of Calatayud and Comarca del Aranda (Adri Calatayud-Aranda) and Territorio Mudéjar already have the plaque that accredits their participation in the project “Asociación Territorio Mudéjar Centro de Innovación Rural”, framed in the Rural Development Programme 2014-2021.

Thanks to the help of this project we have:

  • Devised and implemented a virtual work platform that is a very good tool for networking through new technologies.
  • Designed at the headquarters of Territorio Mudéjar, in the Mudejar Museum of Tobed, a pilot interdisciplinary workspace and possible ‘coworking’ for the development of research and scientific projects and that can serve as a model and reference for the network studying municipal spaces that can be shared workplaces.
  • Worked on the signposting and dissemination of the travelling exhibition Mudejar 20th Anniversary World Heritage by means of mobile boards. This exhibition can be seen until Sunday 27th in the old consulting room of the Ricla strait from 18.00 to 20.00 and will be moved to the different towns of Territorio Mudéjar throughout the year.

New summer courses to learn about the Mudejar or subjects related to our territory.

If you would like to make the most of the summer to learn more about Mudejar art or deepen your knowledge of subjects related to our Territorio Mudéjar and its history and heritage, we invite you to participate in some of the extraordinary courses of the University of Zaragoza programmed or related to our towns.

Journey to the Mudejar art of the regions of Calatayud, Aranda, Daroca and Valdejalón. 20th anniversary of the declaration of the Mudejar as World Heritage. Homage to Professor Gonzalo M. Borrás Gualis (Calatayud, 12-14 July).

It is coordinated by José Luis Cortés, tutor professor at the UNED Calatayud, with the collaboration of Victoria Trasobares Ruiz, director of Territorio Mudéjar.

The aim is to study first hand the Mudejar art of the regions of Aranda, Calatayud, Daroca and Valdejalón by means of detailed visits to all the most outstanding monuments, which are characterised by having preserved the original Mudejar spaces to the present day. The aim is to delve into the geographical, historical, ethnographic and artistic framework that allowed Aragonese Mudejar art to be declared a World Heritage Site in 2001.

The Social Function of Cultural Heritage: Uses, Projects, Models and Potentialities (Jaca, 21-23 July)

The course addresses the different challenges that cultural heritage management faces today, with the new referential framework set by the Sustainable Development Goals and concepts such as “cultural rights”. For this purpose, a series of lectures and round tables have been programmed to address the problems, but above all the potentialities around very diverse issues that Cultural Heritage and its management as a tool for social change have in common: inclusion, universal accessibility, sustainability, local development, depopulation…

Victoria Trasobares Ruiz, director of Territorio Mudéjar, participates as a speaker.

II Course-workshop on physical anthropology and palaeopathology in skeletal and mummified remains of the Museo de las Momias de Quinto (Quinto, 5-9 July)

The theory will have a practical application in the laboratory, with workshop sessions that will include work on the classification and analysis of skeletal and mummified remains exhumed from El Piquete de Quinto.

The aim of the course in Quinto is to approach the Museo de Momias, the first of its kind in Spain, through guided tours of the facilities and an exhibition of the preventive conservation methodology carried out by the Instituto de Estudios Científicos en Momias (IECIM).

Bartolomé Bermejo and Gothic painting in the regions of Campo de Daroca and Calatayud. The Heritage of empty Spain. (Darocz, 28-30 July).

It is coordinated by José Luis Cortés, tutor lecturer at the UNED in Calatayud and Fabián Mañas, PhD in Art History. The aim is to study and disseminate the artistic heritage of the towns that make up the Campo de Daroca region and the Community of Calatayud . Among them all, Bartolomé Bermejo stands out, whose entry into the artistic panorama of Daroca meant an aesthetic and technical revolution in the seventies of the 15th century.

https://cursosextraordinarios.unizar.es/…/bartolome…

International Museum Day: the challenge of reclaiming and reimagining spaces

With the slogan “The future of museums: recovering and reimagining”, today Territorio Mudéjar joins the celebration of International Museum Day 2021.

The aim this year is to invite museums, their professionals and communities to create, imagine and share new practices of (co)creation of value, new business models for cultural institutions and innovative solutions to the social, economic and environmental challenges of today.

This commemoration was created in 1977 by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) to raise public awareness of what these centres contribute to the development of society.

We share with you the videos about some of the museums of our Territorio Mudéjar:

Lugares patrimoniales como espacios de conocimiento.
-La Almunia de Doña Godina. 
-Borja.
-Tobed.
-Calatayud.
-Quinto.
-Daroca.

And we invite you to discover them all here.

We remind you that the Archaeological Museum of Fréscano and the Museum of the Celsa Colony of Velilla de Ebro have also been added to the list.

Happy Museum Day!

Stays 2020: Mudejar plaster, an element of identity, knowledge and future opportunities

The project Mudéjar plaster, an element of identity, knowledge and opportunities for the future has had a broad scope with the aim of facilitating knowledge for a compatible intervention in the traditional architecture of Mudéjar villages.

The objectives have been, on the one hand, to disseminate the true role of plaster in traditional Aragonese architecture, carrying out a study and quantification of the construction systems and techniques carried out with traditional plaster in the villages of the Mudejar territory, both in popular architecture and in monumental architecture. And secondly, to study the composition of a plaster that can be manufactured nowadays and that preserves the legacy received, allowing the reactivation of some of the quarries studied and fixing the population in the rural environment, for its reintroduction in contemporary architecture or for restoration and rehabilitation; including the analysis of its economic, social and sustainable viability, returning it to some of the uses it had in the past.

The municipalities that took part in this study were Aniñón, Borja, Calatayud, Daroca, Fuentes de Ebro, La Almunia de Doña Godina, Maluenda, Quinto de Ebro, Ricla, San Mateo de Gállego, Tauste, Terrer, Tobed, Villa de Jiloca, Villafeliche, Villamayor de Gállego and Zuera.

During the study of these municipalities, the construction typologies executed with traditional plaster in old and recent constructions have been identified, locating major aspects that coincide between the municipalities in the versatility of the use of plaster, both in interior cladding, façade applications, exterior decorations, flooring and structural elements until the great change that construction underwent between 1950-1970 with the arrival of modern materials, relegating traditional materials to oblivion.

Mineralogical studies of Mudéjar plaster have revealed the presence of hydraulic phases in Mudéjar plaster (which was fired at very high temperatures), making these plasters much more resistant to stress than modern plasters, which are fired at very low temperatures.

With this contribution of knowledge about this traditional material, the importance of preserving the legacy and knowledge of making Mudejar plaster, a process that remained unchanged until the mid-20th century when the link of knowledge passed down and refined over many generations was broken.

LINE OF RESEARCH: New Perspectives

AUTHORS:

Project coordinator: Pedro Bel Anzué. Environmental Architecture.

Principal Investigators: Marta Monzón Chavarrías (University of Zaragoza), Kerstin Elert (University of Granada), José Manuel López Osorio (University of Málaga), David Sanz Arauz (Polytechnic University of Madrid).

Advisors linked to the project: Ramón Rubio Domene (Alhambra, Granada) and Antonio Almagro Gorbea (Escuela de Estudios Árabes-CSIC).

Stays 2020: Mudejar heritage and agricultural calendar: the poetics of landscape. Design and programming of pilot experiences for visits during the seasons of the year.

The Mudejar heritage and agrarian calendar project aims to complement the current cultural programming in the territory by designing, creating and evaluating events in which this is of special importance. In this way, it allows not only direct contact with it for those who visit it, but also the interpretation of the agricultural landscape as an irreplaceable piece of identity. This also makes it possible to involve the local communities by highlighting the work on the land and the traditional agricultural product. With Aragonese Mudejar art as the guiding thread and with the agricultural landscape and traditional agricultural activities as the thematic criterion for the actions, the agricultural calendar is the backbone that allows the activities to be developed in an orderly manner and with a reasoned criterion.

In this first phase, the project has focused on diagnosing needs and interpreting the work area with a methodology that includes participant observation to identify the possibilities of linkage and the spatial and temporal articulation between the agrarian and architectural heritage assets and the agrarian calendar. This has made it possible – conditioned by the pandemic that has restricted mobility and access to certain localities at specific times when it was sometimes imperative due to the agricultural calendar (flowering, harvesting, etc.) – to know and understand the possible variables of action depending on the areas worked on.

These spaces are unique due to their differences in cultivation and the resulting landscape within the territory, which have so far been determined in a remarkable way with regard to the valleys that make up the Mudéjar Territory area by means of field trips and the production of materials in situ in the Jalón valley (Ricla, La Almunia de Doña Godina and Cabañas), the Ribota valley (Aniñón, Torralba de Ribota and Cervera de la Cañada) and the Huerva valley (Villar de los Navarros and Romanos). Finally, mention should be made of the Jalón-Jiloca valley with the towns of Maluenda, Morata de Jiloca and Villafeliche. Another of the areas analysed, in this case from an exclusively documentary perspective as a way of partially resolving the shortcomings caused by the interruptions in fieldwork mentioned above, was the Huerva valley. In this way, the localities of Cosuenda and Longares were the main object of the bibliographical data collection.

On the basis of this work and the adjustment of future work, especially organised with a view to resolving possible mobility restrictions, the actions aimed at testing and evaluating the first en route projects planned, which are aimed at promoting public access, interpretation and enjoyment of the Mudejar cultural landscape, made up of values such as its architecture, the different areas of agricultural production and the seasonal processes inherent to human activity in them, will now be derived from this work. Likewise, dissemination through Territorio Mudéjar, aimed at a better understanding of the importance of the agricultural landscape as an asset and part of the community, has been rethought from the perspective of anticipation in order to achieve a greater presence in the networks than has been achieved to date due to the current socio-health circumstances.

LINE OF RESEARCH: it can be framed within the double line of research Mudejar Territory and cultural landscape and the management of cultural heritage.

THE AUTHORS:

  • Juan Ignacio Santos Rodríguez, coordinator of the project, holds a PhD in Art History and is a specialist in cultural management.
  • Elvira del Pilar Domínguez Castro has a degree in Art History and is an independent cultural manager.
 

Stays 2020: New models of cultural management and funding for restoration projects of Mudejar civil-monumental buildings in the province of Zaragoza

Taking as a starting point the previous research work of this team Study of Mudejar civil architecture in the regions of Borja, Aranda, Calatayud and Daroca and its efficient management, this new research project, entitled New models of Cultural Management and Financing for restoration projects of Mudejar civil-monumental buildings in the province of Zaragoza, seeks to expand on what has already been studied and develop a preliminary project focused on the practical part.

The core of the work has focused on the house-palace of the Luna family in Daroca, a Mudejar civil building in which Don Pedro de Luna, better known as “Papa Luna”, lived. This building is now in disuse. This research seeks a functional solution for this building that justifies its restoration, respecting its original structure and distribution as far as possible, extending its use over time and allowing it to be a self-sufficient, self-financing and useful building.

After the work of study, research, fieldwork, various proposals and meetings with the Fundación Campo de Daroca (owner of most of the building), the town council of Daroca, and the architect-visitor Javier Ibargüen, the proposal to convert this emblematic building into the new archive-library of the regional capital was accepted. With this decision, the objectives of conservation, utility and self-sufficiency were achieved. The original structure and layout would be maintained, as the available space was more than sufficient, cultural purposes would be promoted as an attraction for the region and, in addition, employment would be created, as cultural activities would be carried out in the centre itself.

In order to carry out this mission, a working methodology has been developed that will address it in several phases:

  1. Study of the building and development of a master plan to verify the needs of the building for its restoration and adaptation to the management project that was decided to be carried out on it. This work was done in collaboration with the architect Javier Ibargüen, and on the basis of the previous studies he had already carried out on the palace.
  2. Study of the possibilities that the building offered for its second life, trying to respect as much as possible its original structure and distribution. The study was carried out in collaboration with the Campo de Daroca Foundation and the local town council. In order to make the best possible decision, the management of this use and the benefits that would be obtained through it were assessed.
  3. Development of the final draft project and calculation of the budget for the work, for which a search for different sources of funding would be sought.
  4. Finally, with the support of public and/or private entities, workers would be hired to carry out the restoration work and those required by the new function of the building.

The work objectives were always twofold: the study of the building and its architectural characteristics and the search for appropriate uses, linked to the historical-cultural interest, and its good management, always pointing out self-sufficiency and self-financing as the main aims, as well as its continued use over time, trying to respect the original structure and distribution.

LINE OF RESEARCH: (3 Cultural heritage management.

AUTHORS:

  • Marta López Veamonte, art historian.
  • Ricardo Monreal Lafuente, art historian.