LUCIA HERRERO

DELTA

Assignment by ELS TEMPS DE LES ARTS

Completed for Els Temps de Les Arts, a prestigious magazine in the world of arts in Catalonia, I embarked on a captivating assignment. My task was to explore and reinterpret aspects of Catalan culture, immersing myself in the enchanting surroundings of the Ebro Delta in Tarragona. There, I selected four ancient traditions that captured my attention: the joteros, the cabezudos, the fire devils, and the local music band.

I added a touch of stylism to their costumes, aiming to transcend the boundaries of reality.

Traditional festivals has always fascinated me. I consider it an accepted madness by the majority, a moment when the human soul breaks free from the chains of the everyday. On that special day, the monster, the scream, the leap, the exaggeration, and the fire take center stage.

Like anything normalized, this accepted madness shines once again before our eyes when the context changes or when a formal element challenges the established uniform.

In my photographic adventure, I managed to immerse the fire devils in the water, with their torches, dressed in black and red in a street style reminiscent of the subways of 1980s New York.

The cabezudos (Big heads) retain only their heads. I stripped them of their garments, leaving them in their underwear. It is every child's fantasy to lift the skirts of a cabezudo and see who is underneath.

The joteros, dancers and singers of improvised poems, dance on the dunes and are slightly complemented with dark sunglasses, like the "Men in Black" of the rural world. One of them, the one with the cane, wears twenty pearl necklaces, just as a patriarch would in his tribe.

Three women from the village music band of Amposta play the drum and the trumpets on the horizon, and their traditional uniforms are halfway through a transformation.