A procession of art, memory, and artichokes
📽️ Watch the video here
What if, instead of viewing art inside a museum, we walked with it through the furrows of a field? What if masterpieces, instead of being locked behind glass, were paraded down the streets to the rhythm of a local band, among students, horses, and vegetables?
That’s the premise behind The People’s Museum. Masterpieces. Hack The Museum, a performative art intervention by Spanish artist and activist Daniel García Andújar. Inspired by Spain’s historic Pedagogical Missions—cultural expeditions in the 1930s that brought books, theatre, and artworks to rural towns—this project reimagines that legacy through a contemporary, critical lens.
In Almoradí, the artist’s hometown and the largest producer of artichokes in Europe, the project took on a unique form. On a sunny day, more than 85 musicians from the Unión Musical de Almoradí, 40 local residents, two horseback riders, and a group of students staged a powerful procession. Together, they carried reproductions of iconic paintings from the Prado and Hermitage museums, including the symbolic Still Life with Artichokes, Flowers and Glass Vessels by Juan van der Hamen, from the town center to the surrounding farmland, crossing the historic Árbol de los Mazones and ending among orange trees and artichoke rows.
This was no folkloric reenactment. It was a collective, poetic gesture of cultural reclaiming—a way of turning the agricultural landscape into a living museum, an ephemeral architecture of memory. Art, in this case, isn’t passively observed:
it’s cultivated. Walked. Shared. Re-signified.
As Andújar explains:
“I wanted to reclaim the artichoke—the huerta—as museum, landscape, and heritage. It is our history.”
And indeed, this project plants an urgent question:
Who decides what gets preserved as cultural heritage? And from where are those stories told?
🌍 The People’s Museum has also taken place in Murcia, Cartagena, Santiago de Compostela, Valencia, Barcelona, Alicante, and Guangzhou (China), adapting to each context and its communities. But it is in the fields of Almoradí where it truly took root.
📽️ Watch the full video of the procession here:
👉 https://youtu.be/b6dnquwNa_4?feature=shared
#ThePeoplesMuseum #DanielGarciaAndujar #Almoradi #ArtInTheFields #HackTheMuseum #CollectiveHeritage #ArtAsRight #PedagogicalMissions
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