The Fallas festival, especially that of the city of Valencia, today it shows a disturbing inability to face the challenges that beset it, despite its declaration as Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2016. Far from promoting a real transformation, this recognition has coincided with an intensification of its festive domestication: standardization, bureaucratization, commodification and depoliticization policy that have deactivated popular transgressive energy and made it predictable and controllable. This drift is not accidental, but the result of a conservative and immobilist structure, largely inherited from Francoism and the immobilist forces that derive from it, which blocks any profound change and assimilates or neutralizes attempts at renewal. The result is an outdated holiday regime, sustained by hegemonic narratives, internal collaborationisms and subjectivities colonized by neoliberalism and the cultural extractivism that is inherent to it. Consequently, we are facing a party that, unable to face the serious problems of the society in which it is inserted, it becomes a simulacrum of itself, a mirage of consolation fueled by a meaningless neoliberal hedonism: some Fallas without substance, without meaning, sense focus.
With the participation of:
Gil-Manuel Hernández (Author)
Neus Navarro (journalist)
Louis Mesa (Faller Studies Association)
Luis Fernandez (Faller Studies Association)
