The love of art manifests itself in many ways. Looking closely at a miniature city, as if through a magnifying glass, demonstrates this love of art.
Someone told me a few days ago, here in Hive, that they don't make these representations of art like they used to, that you see very little of it and actually in the city where I used to live I had never seen anything so spectacular.
Maybe because it costs a lot of money to do something like that, I don't know. But what I do know is that today I can appreciate this form of art that I couldn't before and that is very gratifying.
I have always been interested in models and here in Spain I have seen several, for example, the models of several of the city's emblematic buildings and castles. Many of them I have seen in museums and I have loved them.
But this representation of art or model, like many other nativity scenes, is very special. Not only because of its dimensions, which are very large, but also because it allows you to take a journey through history by walking imaginatively through its small, narrow streets of sand and rock.
I tried to get as close as possible to enter this small world and look at the expressions of the faces of the small sculptures, but they were so well done that, as I said once, the work of detail and perfection surprised me.
But it's not just the work but the passion with which this kind of thing is done, people who really feel that inner strength of emotion for these things, for this art, whether it's driven by religion or by the art itself. That doesn't matter, what matters is the result.
My thought at that moment was to take pictures as if I had become small and walked those streets, as if those little people made of various materials came to life and that city or cities and all the history was alive in that moment.
With so much detail and perfection it was easy to imagine myself among them and to live through silent art how certain facts and events were. I would have been a kind of time traveller, going back to the time of the birth of Christ and seeing it all with my own eyes.
I had the feeling that I could do it through this marvellous, gigantic and perfect Christmas crib. I could see at the end of each little street more scenes of the story and one continued to the other as if silently telling the past, where the light focused where it should focus, where it was important to do so and the play of shadows gave that feeling and emotion that accompanies life.
In the background I could hear the passing of a river and the water fountains and then when I reached that part of the model I could see with my eyes how well structured the environment was. It was really like being in a real city, the wood looked like wood, the rock looked like rock and every detail made the whole perfect of this majestic artistic representation of past times.
It was like being inside a portal that made me see and see expressions of the faces of the people of that moment, people walking, pointing at something, talking, working, although all of them were motionless, still in their places, just where they should be to be photographed and brought to this present.
In this way I could go into the streets, the houses, ruins, look at the people in miniature, every gesture, every position denoting what they were doing, as if they had been brought from somewhere else and were frozen.
It was a very pleasant experience and I hope to find more of these models these days walking through different parts of the city. I discovered that this activity is called belenismo, the making of models of nativity scenes and this is the biggest one I have ever seen in my life and it is located in the town hall of the city of Malaga.
Thank you all for watching and reading this far. I wish you a very good Sunday. See you soon.
Amonet.
All photographs are my own.
