Composition of three color photographs, 1m x 1m each mounted on aluminum. 

​

​

The Happy Holidays series presents a selection of vacation moments found in the postcards of the Planas Archive. It consists of a combination of en-

larged postcard details arranged in triptychs and diptychs, although they also function individually.

​

While the images could reference almost any tourist destination in the world during a certain period, they are also highly representative of the promotion of Spain and specifically the Balearic Islands as a tourist destination at a time when the Franco dictatorship was opening up to the outside world, and Europe was deciding that the South would become the playground of the North.

 

The philosophical reflection on how images function, and the idea that the image-document is not a faithful copy of reality, is present throughout Marina Planas' work. The Happy Holidays series emphasizes, on one hand, the idea of generating fiction and desire through the utopia of tourism. Postcards are staged and carefully prepared images designed to attract visitors. On the other hand, the postcard is the very embodiment of memory, of the souvenir; therefore, it refers to a past that is no longer present, to an absence, to an imagined fiction.

 

By definition, an image can never be fully closed, as there is always a translation, an explanation yet to come. Photography, as an object, announces its presence but resists being definitively defined. Once again, it is always the context surrounding the image that will ultimately assign it one meaning or another.

 

The Happy Holidays series emphasizes the impossibility of accessing that touristic past with analytical rigor, since we cannot verify whether that reference to the past is truly faithful. The ideas of repetition, iteration, interpretation, and serialization of images are a constant throughout Marina Planas' work, as they are deeply rooted in the concept of the archive, in industrial societies whose economic engines are based on monoculture, and in the obsessive and tautological nature of artistic production.

 

By definition, the image can never be closed, as there is always a translation, an explanation yet to come. Photography, as an object, announces its presence but resists being defined. Once again, it will always be the context that accompanies the image that will give it one meaning or another.