Marina Planas

Sound installation composed of a table (50x68) a plate, fork, knife, glass and white tablecloth, postcard (9cmx14cm) and postal sales file. Audio that comes from helmets. 

Copy of the postal sales file arranged on the wall.

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A table that invites the viewer to eat a postcard that is part of the Planas Archive and that represents the idea of paradise through an image of a tourist on top of a camel, in the middle of a paradisiacal enclave. This postcard is served on a plate, imitating the aesthetics of a hotel dining room. From the helmets emerges a sound collage in which news of the current events of Magaluf and Arenal are recreated (from balconing to uncontrolled drunkenness), the songs of El Puente and Amore are heard in Palma de Mallorca and also recreate the publicity locutions of the Balearic Islands as a tourist destination.

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On the wall: sales file of the postcard in which appears the dromedary Mohamed who died after taking high doses of herbal herbs to his more than 80 years. He posed for tourists for decades on the beach of Palma and his image travelled around the world in the form of a postcard 13,069 times in 1967. The sale of this type of postcards produced by Josep Planas attracted tourists who year after year were increasing in number until we reach the situation in which we find ourselves today. The postcard in question established part of the visual iconography developed during the decades of the 50s and 60s that fed the idea of Mallorca as an exotic place to attract more visitors to our islands. This piece highlights the practice of learning from yesterday through the remains of the materials that remain we’ve got left 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 temporary zone that the postcard and the file occupy.

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. 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.

 

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