Miralda Ties the Knot on His ‘Honeymoon Project’

A giant high-heeled shoe with Venetian gondola trimmings stands in the courtyard of Bombas Gens Centre d’Art like a monument to fairy-tale slippers. Yet, this is a true-to-size stiletto, made to fit a 93-metre-tall debutante who stands in New York’s harbour: the Statue of Liberty. Created in 1990 by Antoni Miralda as a wedding gift for Liberty’s proposed symbolic marriage to another monument of similar vintage, the Columbus Monument in Barcelona, the original shoe was taken down the Grand Canal before forming the centrepiece to the artist’s Spanish Pavilion at that year’s Venice Biennale. This replica, fabricated by a Valencian fallero craftsman, is destined for the collection of the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid. For now, it provides Miralda and Bombas Gens with a neat excuse for a send-off performance (Liberty’s Little Shoe, 2023) and the exhibition ‘Honeymoon: Unclassified’, which documents the sprawling Honeymoon Project (1986–92) – a milestone in the long career of an artist known for his ebullient multicoloured food rituals and multicultural parades.

Miralda moved to New York in the 1970s, then to Miami in the early 1990s, before recently returning to his native Catalonia, and the axis of the Honeymoon Project’s ironic conceit is the monumental society wedding as an equivocal celebration of cultural exchange between the so-called old and new worlds. Over the years, Miralda’s metaphor was writ large through dozens of make-believe nuptial rites and dedications of colossal bridal regalia that coincided with the 1986 centennial of the Statue of Liberty and the 1992 quincentennial of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas.

At Bombas Gens, an island of display cases filled with invitations, publications, posters and shoe-making sketches is complemented by a three-tier timeline along one wall. Detailing the project from 1974 precursors to date, the chronology gives a picture of the hundreds of collaborators involved, from artisans, chefs, designers and sponsors to members of the public. An enormous cake was displayed in Paris (Gateau Monument, 1989), a ring in Birmingham (Eternity Ring, 1991), a dress in New York (The Wedding Gown, 1991) and, in 1992, a wedding was held in Las Vegas. Displayed below is a reordering of events that follows a more logical courtship-to-honeymoon sequence, while a wishful row under that incorporates unrealized elements. A selection of drawings related to the latter, including proposals for elaborate carnival floats, adorns one adjacent wall, while a video documenting Liberty’s Little Shoe screens on the other.

This processionary addendum saw the shoe paraded from its maker, through the city’s agricultural hinterland, to its old fishing port and into the historic centre, accompanied by eight chaperones representing the ancient irrigation channels of Valencia and referencing its Islamic heritage through their costumes. The clamorous cavalcade incorporated neighbourhood bands and the local chapter of the Harley-Davidson owners club. Drawing out aqueous and trading connections between Venice and Valencia, and culminating in a tapas tasting, the parade added yet more syncretism to the Honeymoon Project. In doing so, it evolved the work almost entirely away from a celebrity husband who is today more widely understood as the trigger for the brutal subjugation of indigenous peoples, rather than, as the wry 1992 Prenuptial Agreement featured in the exhibition states, a ‘symbol of discovery and adventure’.

Yet, biting decolonial critique is not really Miralda’s intent. Honeymoon Project does not dismantle monuments; rather, it punctures their pompousness with excessive festive flattery to create new collective mythologies. While the documentation of the project’s past lives almost quaintly recalls the taste of hope of early-1990s globalization and bilateralism, the piquant performative farewell was deliberately too much. It follows that ‘Honeymoon: Unclassified’ gave Miralda’s appetite for inclusive and pluralistic worldviews a revival in the best etymological sense of a culinary hodge podge – by shaking the pot.

Miralda’s ‘Honeymoon: Unclassified’ is on view at Bombas Gens Centre d’Art, Valencia, until 26 November.

_{Main image: Miralda, La Sabateta de la Liberty (Liberty’s Little Shoe), performance documentation. Courtesy: © the artist and Bombas Gens Centre d’Art, Valencia; Photo: Tania Castro}