Art and Tourism Imaginaries V
After the Future
Free, until full capacity is reached, with prior ticket collection at the Museo’s Ticket Offices or on the Museo Reina Sofía website from 10am on 7 July. A maximum of 2 per person
This session, the fifth in the series organised with the research group TURICOM, sets out to explore the relationship between tourist imaginaries and the visual arts from the 1960s onwards. The activity looks to reflect on the difficulty, and urgency, of imagining a world after, or beyond, tourism, with the programme comprising a compendium of brief lectures and a subsequent presentation of specific case studies by architecture and urbanism teams involved in re-wilding environments affected by tourism exploitation.
On one side, the tourist industry’s carbon footprint positions it as one of the main forces of environmental transformation; on the other, the touristification of urban centres lays bare its devastating impact on housing, neighbourhood fabric and local trade. Nevertheless, in Spain the tourism-progress-modernisation equation, which began under Francoism, still dominates the institutional logic of the State to a large degree.
This session thinks about the need to jettison that which presents itself as inevitable. The task of recomposing relations and ecologies in a hypothetical post-tourism scenario means to pinpoint practices from which to learn and sensibilities to enhance; thus a series of architectural and artistic interventions are discussed which provide us with tools and images to cultivate other (im)possible worlds.
Cristina Arribas is an architect and urban planner at Badalona City Council, and a professor in the Department of Theory and History at the Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB). Her recent publications most notably include “El nuevo paisaje turístico español a través de las tarjetas postales de los años 60” (The New Landscape of Spanish Tourism Through 1960s Postcards) in Sobre, issue 5 (2018) and “La puesta en escena del paisaje turístico español en el boom desarrollista” (The Mise en Scène of the Spanish Tourism Landscape During the Developmentalist Boom), in La ciudad en el cine (Asimétricas, 2022).
José Díaz Cuyás is a professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the University of La Laguna. With Carmen Pardo and Esteban Pujals, he curated the exhibition The Pamplona Encounters 1972: The End of the Party for Experimental Art (Museo Reina Sofía, 2009–2010). His most recent publishing projects include coordinating issue 10 (on art and tourism) of the magazine Concreta and the publication “Movilizados por lo real: turistas, soldados, artistas” (sobre Marcel Broodthaers) [Mobilized by the Real: Tourists, Soldiers, Artists] (on Marcel Broodthaers), in Arquitectura: lenguajes fílmicos (2009-2016) (Tabakalera, 2018).
Ramón Vicente Díaz del Campo Martín-Mantero is an art historian, a professor of Contemporary Spanish Art and an exhibition curator at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM). His central works revolve around the architect Miguel Fisac, the subject of his doctoral thesis, and his publications most notably include articles and texts which approach different aspects of Spanish art during the 1950s and 1960s.
Julián Díaz Sánchez is a lecturer in Art History at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM). He is the author of, among other works, Políticas, poéticas y prácticas artísticas. Apuntes para una historia del arte (Catarata, 2009), La idea de arte abstracto en la España de Franco (Cátedra, 2013) and Pensar la historia del arte. Viejas y nuevas propuestas (Universidad de Zaragoza, 2021).
Xavier Quintana Pou is a lecturer of Ecology at the Institut d’Ecologia Aquàtica from the Universitat de Girona. He is also the director of Càtedra d’Ecosistemes Litorals Mediterranis, which aims to contribute to the study, management and recovery of natural spaces in Bajo Ter. Within this framework, he has carried out different ecological restoration projects in coastal wetlands, for instance the project Life Pletera.
Isaac Marrero is a professor of Anthropology at the Universitat de Barcelona. His publications include The Art of Dissent: Adventures in London’s Olympic State (Marshgate Press, 2012), with Hilary Powell, and Reassembling Activism, Activating Assemblages (Routledge, 2019), with Denise Milstein and Israel Rodríguez-Giralt.
Verónica Sánchez Carrera is an architect who currently lectures on MA and post-graduate courses at different universities. She also works for the World Health Organisation (WHO) on emergency infrastructures for infectious diseases. She is the co-founder of the n´UNDO organisation and the technical office n’OT | Global-Human-Environment.
Esteve Subirah is a visual artist who investigates issues of representation related to memory and landscape, combining documentary and conceptual practices. He has participated in different exhibitions and projects like Lloc, memòria i salicornia inside the context of the de-urbanisation of La Pletera with the in-situ and permanent intervention Forma 26 Pletera and Fingers Crossed (ADN Platform), a collective show curated by Blanca de la Torre and Sue Spaid which tackles the current ecological crisis.
Programme
After the Party: The Provincial Pavilions at the International Country Fair in Madrid
With Ramón Vicente Díaz del Campo Martín-Mantero
An exploration of how ephemeral architecture at international fairs is disconnected from the events that gave it meaning and purpose, offering us a first possible image of post-tourism.
Modernity and Progress, Made in the USA. Progress follows fiasco
With Cristina Arribas
The future lives of constructions offered by an image of progress provide a unique point of view from which to question the relationship between modernity, architecture and environment. This relationship is expressed fundamentally in the visual language of postcards and, more specifically, in the construction of the Mediterranean coast as a space of progress according to representational codes imported from the USA.
Dirty Beaches. Equipo Crónica and the End of (Tourist) Utopia
With Julián Díaz Sánchez
The counter-image of the tourism, modernity and progress equation can be found in the series Paisajes urbanos (Urban Landscapes) by Equipo Crónica, where the beach appears more as a place of emptiness and waste.
Presentation of n’UNDO (Madrid)
With Verónica Sánchez Carrera
This case study analyses the project to deconstruct and recover the Algabarrico beach in Almería. It constitutes a financial, ecological and pedagogical project of coastal recovery i.e. the (re)construction of relationships between citizens and environment through the dismantling of an infrastructure declared illegal, but which lingers on, regardless. By way of different social, environmental, technical and economic approaches, the idea of turning hotels into a centre of environmental recovery via workshops with different areas is set forth here, and with the priority involvement of local spheres, thereby establishing a benchmark model of innovation and development.
Presentation of Life Pletera (Girona)
With Xavier Quintana Pou and Esteve Subirah
An exposition of the de-urbanisation and environmental restoration project which has managed to ensure the recovery of La Pletera (Girona), a marshland of significant environmental worth that was partially urbanised at the end of the 1980s, but has been left abandoned since the 1990s. Inside the framework of this project, a series of artistic interventions are incorporated under the heading Lloc, memoria i salicornies, giving rise to a reflection on a complex landscape and considering the same idea of regeneration as a problem through an approach to the memory of place.