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The project Zaragoza 2016 is based on 5 guidelines linked to the events, expressions and cultural trends of the city but going beyond the local dimension in which they have had an important role. These are contributions made by Zaragoza to Europe and the world, in support of the candidacy programme that will be defended next July in Brussels.
All those actions link history, heritage, innovation or rupture and multicultural reality to inspire an attractive programme inserted in the common elements that form Europe. A programme able to provoke enthusiasm and to make people adhere to Zaragoza's goal: the international projection of the city and its surrounding area.
Goya, the most universal representative figure in the development of avant-garde arts and knowledge. Evolution, innovation, rupture, modernity,… the precedent of urban art. He is witness and critical conscience of his age. Goya, apart from an academic reference, is also an unconventional, pioneer and rebel artist with a work and a life attitude which resists time and continues to be valid today.
Buñuel, as a surrealist, represents creative freedom, a rebel attitude against dogmas and social conventions. He is the representative of the avant-garde, of the spirit of "modernity", and of a taste for transgression as a ludic element. Buñuel, as Goya, express the world of dreams, of emotions, and also of instinct. He turns his work into a tool for poetry, a criticism from subversion, and the irrational release of desires. Buñuel and Goya are both sons of the never-ending landscape of the desert and the steppe.
Zaragoza is the real capital of the Hispanic World. Spanish language, centuries of mixing between Spanish and autochthonous cultures, and the confirmation of a new identity after two centuries of independence, hold hands in the 21st century. Nowadays, Spain is the European gate to America in this return travel thanks to which we, Europeans, enrich ourselves culturally from the lands we once left.
The Mudejar style -recognised as World Heritage- is the personal hallmark of Aragonese art in the world. The Mudejar symbolises the coexistence of cultures (Muslim, Christian, Jewish,…). The presence in Spain and Europe of big groups of immigrants is an opportunity for mutual enrichment, for a universal hug expressed in the different architectural styles, music, dance, pottery, science and literature, which form an indissoluble part - yesterday and also today- of our culture.
In 2016, it will be celebrated the 500 anniversary of the dead of Ferdinand the Catholic, the Prince "par excellence", forerunner of European relations, and introducer of modernity and the modern State. He focused his campaigns on the Mediterranean and was the factotum of the adventure for discovering America, and its court was an example of humanist court. He promoted the use of the firsts printing presses and reading in the Iberian Peninsula and Europe.
