Location
Monserrat
Start Date
25-6-2026 3:30 PM
End Date
25-6-2026 4:30 PM
Description
This paper analyzes Rosalía’s Lux album as a cultural device that reconfigures the relationships between spirituality, aesthetic experience, and contemporary mobility. Situated within a hybrid lineage of orchestral pop, sacred music, and avant-pop, the album constructs a sonic universe that transcends traditional musical consumption to offer a ritual-like experience. From the perspective of spiritual and cultural tourism, Lux is interpreted as a “symbolic pilgrimage space” where the listener engages in a sensory and affective journey. Its multi-movement structure, linguistic plurality, and references to mystical traditions and female figures from religious heritage shape a narrative of inner displacement that replaces physical travel with emotional transcendence.
The album articulates a central tension between transcendence and materiality, mysticism and pop culture, using "light" (lux) as a metaphor for knowledge and transformation. Consequently, the work redefines contemporary spiritual tourism by shifting it toward experiences mediated by digital culture and the global creative industry, positioning the artist as a mediator between the sacred and the everyday.
Methodologically, this study adopts a qualitative, interdisciplinary, and interpretive-hermeneutic approach. It combines theoretical frameworks from cultural and spiritual tourism, popular music studies, and visual culture analysis to understand how the album produces meaning. Rather than measuring empirical or quantitative impacts, a contextual theoretical analysis is employed to examine how Lux constructs imaginaries of spiritual mobility and sacralizes popular culture within post-secular contexts, establishing music and performance as contemporary spaces of emotional pilgrimage.
Creative Commons License
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Included in
E3) Pop as Sacred Space: Rosalía’s Lux and the Reconfiguration of Contemporary Spiritual Tourism
Monserrat
This paper analyzes Rosalía’s Lux album as a cultural device that reconfigures the relationships between spirituality, aesthetic experience, and contemporary mobility. Situated within a hybrid lineage of orchestral pop, sacred music, and avant-pop, the album constructs a sonic universe that transcends traditional musical consumption to offer a ritual-like experience. From the perspective of spiritual and cultural tourism, Lux is interpreted as a “symbolic pilgrimage space” where the listener engages in a sensory and affective journey. Its multi-movement structure, linguistic plurality, and references to mystical traditions and female figures from religious heritage shape a narrative of inner displacement that replaces physical travel with emotional transcendence.
The album articulates a central tension between transcendence and materiality, mysticism and pop culture, using "light" (lux) as a metaphor for knowledge and transformation. Consequently, the work redefines contemporary spiritual tourism by shifting it toward experiences mediated by digital culture and the global creative industry, positioning the artist as a mediator between the sacred and the everyday.
Methodologically, this study adopts a qualitative, interdisciplinary, and interpretive-hermeneutic approach. It combines theoretical frameworks from cultural and spiritual tourism, popular music studies, and visual culture analysis to understand how the album produces meaning. Rather than measuring empirical or quantitative impacts, a contextual theoretical analysis is employed to examine how Lux constructs imaginaries of spiritual mobility and sacralizes popular culture within post-secular contexts, establishing music and performance as contemporary spaces of emotional pilgrimage.