Marina Planas

The hump gives the dromedary camel its legendary ability to travel up to 100 miles across the desert without drinking water. It stores up to 36 kilograms of fat which can convert into water and energy when it does not have food. While this animal knows how to manage its own resources it seems that the inhabitants of Mallorca are getting silly. The conceptual map shows the inability of the Balearic Islands to manage their own resources. Mohamed works as a metaphor and as a center to explain the problem of water and the disappearance of species. It works as a coment of overpopulation and tourism's impact in all its facets.

​

The mystery of Mohamed's postcard, a dromedary decontextualized from its surroundings, separated from its habitat and used and commercialized as a tourist attraction. One more of mass tourism's nonsense: the mistreatment of an animal for the leisure of those who visit us.

 

Mohamed's premonitory fiction is a new version of these materials with a re-reading from the environmental problem derived from the excesses of tourism and the overpopulation of the Balearic Islands during the summer months and its consequences on the territory. The piece works as a reference to Donna Haraway's "Tentacular Thinking: Athropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene". The book describes how in the Anthropocene man acts as the ruler of all the species that live on the planet. As a God-like Anthropos in a planet transformed and destroyed by human hyper-activity.

 

This project highlights the practice of learning from yesterday through the remains of the materials we have left. It commutes from utopia to the dystopia of tourism.

​

The image on the postcard shows Mohamed the dromedary, who died at over 80 years of age after ingesting huge amounts of “Túnel” a typical Mallorcan herb liqueur. He posed with tourists for decades on Palma beach and in 1967 his image travelled the world in the form of a postcard 13,069 times.The sale of this type of postcard, produced by Josep Planas, attracted tourists who have increasingly grown in number over the years until reaching our current situation. Josep Planas established a somewhat fictional visual iconography during the 50s, 60s and 70s in order to nurture the image of ​​Mallorca as an exotic destination and attract more visitors to our islands. The image of Mohamed shows a utopian world generated through this fictitious lens at a time when optimism, economic growth and social and cultural openness had taken over a country still under the rule of Franco’s dictatorship. It is an image that pertains to the utopianism of tourism.

​

​