The Museu Faller of Valencia Guide

Sobre el projecte

The Museu Faller of Valencia Guide

Javier Mozas i Josep Lluís Marín (coord.)

València, Associació d’Estudis Fallers, 2010

128 p., 22 cm

D.L. V-2005-2010

ISBN 978-84-614-0947-1

Contents

Presentation

Introduction

From the Fire Reprieve to the Museu Faller

The building

Brief tour around the Museu Faller

The reprieved ninots collection

Presentation 

This guide to the Museu Faller is an adapted summary of the book L’indult del foc. Catàleg raonat de la col·lecció de ninots indultats del Museu Faller, a result of a wide research carried out by the Associació d’Estudis Fallers under the coverage of the Sociology and Social Anthropology Department of the Universitat de València, whose three volumes were published by the Valencia City Council between 2002 and 2005.

L’indult del foc analyses in great detail the whole collection of big and children’s reprieved ninots, as well as the setting-up and evolution of the Museu Faller and the Ninot Exhibition. Due to the great extent of this book, it was necessary to summarise all the information in a practical guide mainly focused to museum visitors, as well as to Valencian people and fallers. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the fact that when the Museu Faller was set up on its current location, the former Montolivet Convent, this was located in the city’s outskirts.

In the last decade, the most cosmopolitan tourist area in Valencia, the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències has been built around the museum. This circumstance has increased the number of visitors in the Museu Faller, and the reprieved ninots collection has been appreciated for its singularity, since it is, as far as we know, the only museum in the world where pieces are chosen, year after year, by popular vote.

For this reason, it was necessary to write a guide that could easily and efficiently transmit the most essential items in the Museu Faller to the general public. Thus, the volume begins with a short reference related to the Fire Reprieve celebration, which is the Ninot Exhibition’s origin, which would give rise to the reprieved ninots collection, the basis of the current Museu Faller. Next, the part referred to the Museum. It provides information on the building where it is located, followed by a map to easily move around the halls, and special emphasis to different collections at its background, such as Fallas posters, portraits of the falleres majors of Valencia (Queens of Fallas), and the badge collection. Later, the main part of the guide describes all figurines that make up the reprieved ninots collection, with a brief comment on 34 reprieved figurines and groups (21 big ones and 13 children’s ones), which have been selected because they represent the aesthetic, technical and historical trends of each time period. Since the above-mentioned catalogue only included ninots up to 2004, we have included a big group and a children’s group from recent years, with the purpose of updating the information and outlining recent trend changes.

In short, with the edition of this guide, the Associació d’Estudis Fallers has wanted to give a heritage value to the Fallas festival, especially to all material items that are the only ones to be preserved due to the ephemeral nature of these figurines, the reprieved ninots. And all of the above, with the additional conviction that this collection needs maximum dissemination to value its ethnological and artistic singularity, which is able to symbolically express our different identity and the worldwide-projection capacity of our most international festival.

Gil Manuel Hernández i Martí

President of the Associació d’Estudis Fallers