17th October 2024
Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma presents “Happy the Children of Intranscendent Times”, an exhibition by Lluís Vecina Rufiandis that reflects on memory, territory and mass tourism in the setting of the Mallorcan beach of Sa Coma, in the eastern part of the island.
Curated by Marta Marín-Dòmine, the project is based on the biographical coincidences of two people: the photographer Joan Andreu Puig Farran and the hotelier Jaume Moll, who converge in the aforementioned place: the beach of sa Coma, the context and scene of two decisive events: on the one hand, the landing of the Republican troops in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War and, on the other, since the 1980s it has become a site for mass tourism.
The first, Puig Farran, had covered the landing at sa Coma as a war journalist and later, in the 1950s, he became a commercial photographer, setting up a company to produce tourist postcards, which gave him the opportunity to photograph the same historic places, but then converted into a hotel setting.
For his part, Jaume Moll was one of the main smugglers in the Balearic Islands and founded, with the capital accumulated through this activity, the Royaltur hotel group, building the Hotel Royal Mediterráneo in Sa Coma.
Through an installation using photographs, video, sculptures and archival documents, Vecina Rufiandis makes these temporal juxtapositions clear and contrasts the phenomenon of tourism with its erosive effects on the territory, history and memory, pointing out that the hotel complex is located on the site of the largest mass grave from the war on the island.
The project, therefore, is the fruit of exhaustive research by the artist, who shows multiple faces of a living history in the island’s landscape. The sixties, Mallorca, tourism… resonate in the collective imagination as a promise of modernisation and economic activation. Vecina Rufiandis, however, focuses on the bodies stretched out on the beach, juxtaposing the time line that separates those on holiday with the 500 militiamen who disappeared during the disembarkation.
Marta Marín-Dòmine, curator of the exhibition, explains that ‘from an artistic point of view, I find Lluís Vecina Rufiandis’ gaze very interesting, absent of any melancholy. The artist makes us imagine the past, not so much to go and find it, but because from there we realise the transformations that the island has undergone at the hands of predators of capital. Human and natural capital, which has hidden another capital, that of history, and which still remains hidden’.
Lluís Vecina Rufiandis, artist, adds that the installation ‘aims to emphasise the phenomenon of tourism in order to dispute, within the realm of the symbolic, the imaginaries that we have inherited’.
For David Barro, director of Es Baluard Museu, ‘Lluís Vecina Rufiandis combines two distant but close realities when their effect can be devastating: military occupation and unbridled tourist occupation. He thus links landscape and memory, combining the political with the poetic through different layers of information’.
The exhibition opens to the public on Thursday 17 October 2024 at 7 p.m. and can be visited from 18 October at Es Baluard Museu’s Exhibition Hall D until 19 January 2025.
