Marina Planas

Video-installation composed of a table (50x68) a plate, fork, knife, a wine glass and white tablecloth. Inside the plate some postcards in black and white of Palma de Mallorca. (Planas Archive). Audio that comes from music helmets.

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Video edited with several black and white images from Mallorca during the 60s that show landscapes that no longer exist and that belong to the Archive Planas. The photographs change tonality, resulting in a game of lights and shadows as if they were images that we cannot reach. This way, providing life to photography I suggest that its meaning changes as time passes. In front, a table, similar to that of a hotel dining room that invites the viewer to eat some postcards of Palma served on a plate. From the music helmets emerges a sound collage.

 

This piece highlights the practice of learning from the past through the traces of the materials that remain and how they shape our relationship with the past and the construction of its meaning from the present. Here it is necessary to point out the question of the time zone that the document occupies and if, what is materially present and visible, it is faithful to the event that occurred. This gesture indicates the fragility of the document.

 

The installation is based on some theoretical assumptions:

 

The process of history is conceived as a structural system of perpetual interactions and permutations. So, as the history of tourism in Mallorca changes its meaning, the meaning of the image develops and expands. This reinforces the idea of iteration and body with life, inherent in the archive.

                  

At this point we can talk about the discourse of reconstruction of meanings and the conversion of photography into something else. In the thesis that Jaques Derrida presents on reconstruction, whose operations presuppose that a document can be presented, interpreted, explained and understood in terms of being something else, something can mean something without being-it at all. The re-contextualization and the re-reading of a deconstruction are movements that demonstrate having previously worked with the object, text or idea in question. By definition the list can never be closed, so there is always a translation to come. Photography as an object announces its presence, but refuses to be defined. In the end it is part of a sealed world, of a complex game of presence and absence. It is a denial of access to the referent. This again questions the document and its fragility. These ideas reach the conclusion of the impossibility of accessing this tourist past with analytical rigor, since we are conditioned by historical a priori therefor we cannot verify that this reference to the past is faithful.