Azahar

Azahar is a project that brings together elements of video, dance and 11th-century architecture to symbolically represent time and the ties that may exist between the past and the present. In a dialogue between two women, the scent of orange blossom, azahar, is used as a metaphor to recover a direct connection with the past, where, through air and smell, these two women connect with distant memories and emotions.

The unconscious dwells in the deepest part of the human being; an endless store of memories and riches that carry us into a state of timelessness. Many contemporary writers thus reflected in their narratives longings, desires and nostalgias that, beyond saturated thought, are stirred by this sensation, as subtle as it is innate. “Will it rise to the surface of my conscious mind, that memory, that ancient instant which, drawn by an identical moment, has come from so far to stir and lift itself from the depths of my being?” Proust asks himself as he drinks a cup of tea in which he has dipped a small cake.

The city of Granada, Spain (chosen for the making of Azahar), an important cradle of cultural intermingling, offers the passer-by the chance to feel the weight of history without needing it to be laid out in a precise, chronological order. We thus chose the Cuarto Real de Santo Domingo as a symbol of a set of historic sites that connects us to a past now made present, one that longs to be narrated and ritualised through an artistic act mediating between the innermost depths and the outer world (emotion-space): dance.