As you can imagine, many, many events are being postponed due to the global pandemic Covid 19, we at Juxtapoz will do our best to deliver updates while bringing you art and art news.

Following the cancellation of public events in Spain, the city of Valencia decided to postpone the annual Las Fallas Festival, originally scheduled through March 19, 2020. Our Spring 2018 Travel Insider describes, ”A fusion of traditional and futuristic architecture, the annual home to the time-honored celebration of Fallas, held in commemoration of St.Joseph. The festival is a lively week of art, where a quarter of the population comes together under the umbrella of 750 organizations to construct a Falla, a massive sculpture that can exceed 60 feet in height. Once the sculpture is built and displayed in its colorful vivacity, it is dramatically set aflame in a spectacular display for everyone’s viewing pleasure.” Okuda's took the sculpturing honors in 2018, PichiAvo's in 2019, and this year's monument was designed by our friend and Valencia's very own, Escif.

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Escif's original design for this year's Falla was a magnificent monument of a woman dressed in a simple white shirt and dark pants, meditating in lotus position. Eyes and lips shut in quiet repose, this grand woman invites those around her and the rest of the world to take a deep breath and decelerate. As Escif assembled the sculpture on the main square, news about postponing festivities arrived, so the artist and his team created an ad hoc intervention, outfitting the woman with a face mask. And in a prophetic gesture, the message of this Falla became more moving and yes, urgent, as Escif himself stated:

“The coronavirus crisis is a very difficult global crisis to combat. There is no vaccine against the disease and health infrastructures remain small, due to the speed of the virus spreading. It is showing that the only weapons we have to combat this crisis are patience, calm and hope. We have to decelerate the movement of society long enough for people already infected to pass the disease and not spread it. Patience, calm and hope. These are, precisely, the values transmitted by the great woman meditating in the town hall square. This too shall pass."

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Photo credit from El Plural and the artist