In January, fifteen Moore students enjoyed 12 days in Granada, Spain, as part of their Cultural Immersion class, taught by Dr. Kelly Kirby, Liberal Arts department chair, who traveled with the students.
The group from Moore toured Granada, a southern city in the Andalusia region, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Courtney Warren, a junior Curatorial Studies student, documented the trip. This is the fourth dispatch in a series.
By Courtney Warren, Curatorial Studies junior
No matter which direction you face on the top of the watch tower of the Alhambra, you have a panoramic scene of the city around you. I could see the cathedral a block from our hotel, I could see the far stretches of the newer parts of the city, and I could see the square white buildings on the hill I had seen from this tower from a few days ago.
I had wanted to come to Spain to experience the things we talk about in class firsthand, and here I was in a way I did not expect. I started my art education learning about the Muslim art in the Alhambra, but I did not get it until I was at the top of the watch tower. In curatorial classes we always talk about context. What does it mean to give context? Can you ever possibly contextualize non-Western art in Western spaces? What does it mean to change or alter context in institutions?
Knowing that the Alhambra structure was placed strategically for military purposes is one thing; knowing that Granada was the last Muslim city to fall to Catholic Spain is another. When looking out from the side of a mountain, from a tower, and seeing everything around you for miles and miles, I understood the context in a way that seeing pictures couldn’t show me.
I remember the day I saw calligraphy of the Alhambra in my Convention, Cannon, Sign class freshman year. Seeing the throne room in person, getting the experience of walking into the room and not being able to see where the sultan would have sat because of the intricate control of light used to direct and intimidate those who enter gave flesh and blood to the lessons I’d been learning for three years. I knew that getting out of my own American context, which I never had the opportunity to do before attending Moore, was important for my practice as a curator. Now I really have a grasp on what context means in a cultural sense.
After our Alhambra visit, we took a cooking class. Our teacher, Ana, was just about the sweetest woman ever and she taught us how to make a few different Spanish foods. I’m actually really blown away about what this showed me. For my whole life, my mom has cooked potatoes with peppers and onions with an egg for breakfast, a recipe she learned from her Puerto Rican neighbors. In our cooking class, we made an almost identical recipe to eat alongside the other foods we made. Given that Spain colonized Puerto Rico before America did, it's not hard to connect the dots. This would have been really great to talk about in my Cultural Collisions class when we studied Atlantic History. We talked about how colonialism affected cultural diffusion, and how it continues today. This recipe that made its way to my life came from a tradition in a village in Spain.
Read part one of the series here.
