Holy Land

Team

• Ander Gondra Aguirre
• Gorka López de Munain
• Marina G. De Angelis.

Description

In December 1999, the Tierra Santa theme park was opened in Buenos Aires. It is a space in which the main landmarks of the city of Jerusalem are recreated in cardboard, as a setting for promoting a particular catechesis based on several key moments in the life of Jesus. It is understandable that the initial assessment of this particular leisure centre is irremediably mediated by kitsch exaltation: the holy places reproduced in polyurethane, the Creation explained in a show of “images, light, sound and laser beams”, the resurrection represented by an enormous 18-metre Christ that emerges from the Calvary every hour… However, after this first impression, a more attentive and unprejudiced look allows us to find a series of analytical elements that problematise a flat and merely contemptuous reading, perceiving how, in reality, Tierra Santa is an effective setting for rethinking a multitude of questions linked to the use of images, religious material culture or religion in the contemporary world. In this sense, during Holy Week in 2015 we made several audiovisual recordings with the aim of understanding to what extent the basic approach of this park on the banks of the River Plate is rooted in a multitude of previous attempts to replicate or delocalize the mythical city of Jerusalem, with the tradition of liturgical dramas, the imperative of the imitatio Christi or other experiences of leisure and spectacularization of religion over the last centuries. The camera's gaze allowed us to explore in a suggestive way (and complementary to the field visits) the responses and interactions that the visitors to the theme park had with the images.