Palma“Wherever you look, the plague of aliens (…) They’ve paid for admission, we’re animals in a zoo / If I had a machine gun I’d say so…” These verses are part of it ‘“Poseidonia” is one of the album’s themes AtlantisWritten by Joan Mikel Oliver. It is one of many examples of how the consequences of mass tourism have penetrated the islands’ made culture in recent years, as evidenced by novels such as Against the world By Per Anthony Pons, ash in the pool, By Laura Jost, ed anger, Written by Sebastia Alzamora; Albums like popular souvenirs, Written by Joana Jumila and Laia Valles – also authors of the generational anthem “Jota dels hereuses”‘– I nostalgic airlines, by Maria Jaume, as well as many works by artists such as Luisa Feberer and Bel Fullana.
But this is not a recent attitude among creative people: it has been years, in fact, decades, that island painters, musicians and writers have warned, and even predicted, the saturation that the Balearic Islands are currently experiencing. Many did so in times when the smallest shadow of doubt about the tourism model was either a taboo topic or an opinion that qualified for extremism.
1987
“There are a lot of goris and I want to get out of here.”
Just a few days ago, journalist and ARA Balears collaborator Anthony Janner shared on the networks the lyrics of the song “I had a house in Mallorca”, one of the songs of the group Manacorí Occults, included in the album. ba amp ole national, 1990. “One day a thousand foreigners came / They started building a thousand hotels / And the square boxes came to the sky / And the dirty pipes came to the sea,” he said before repeating: “Okay, okay, that’s good, that’s good, that’s enough.” ” However, a few years ago, on the first album published by the band Manacorina, another song was included that was at least revealing: Holidays alone “They’re arriving by plane nonstop / It used to be in the summer, now it’s year round (…) / There’s too many others and I want to get out of here,” they sang. That was in 1987, and there were exactly thirty left because the government headed by Francina Armengol, with Environmental Sovereignty Minister Bill Barcelo as Tourism Minister, promoted the campaign. Better in winter To “extend the tourist season” and “reduce summer crowding,” according to the press release they submitted with it.
“I lived like a beach that was completely pristine, like in Cooma, which in a very short time was filled with boxes and hotels and… everything I knew, that pristine and beautiful beach, where my father took me to his house,” explains Anthony Nicolau, singer and lyricist of the band Ocults. It is a band whose name was initially in Spanish, “When he was riding a motorcycle to eat a piece of watermelon, he disappeared after four or five years in a radical way.” In the end, the history of the group is also the history of rediscovering and reevaluating our identity, which we had to go out in search of About it because we were not taught in this sense. He adds: “We were children of an identity trampled and controlled by self-hatred.” He confirms that this issue has been present throughout the band’s career, as evidenced by other, more explicit songs such as “No venguis sa terra” on their penultimate album, It goes like thisIt was released in 2007, with a melody that began with the following message: “To a strange people who are invading me / Do not sell their land for four times as much.” Nicolau is currently preparing new solo tracks, he warns, which will also address all these issues.
1978
“Don’t come on holiday to Mallorca”
Also in the field of painting, there have been several calls for attention regarding the tourism model, many of which are linked to the lunar workshop. One of the most symbolic copies is one of the copies of the legendary prism neon de mackerel Which was part of an exhibition held in Lund, Switzerland. Published in 1978, it was entirely dedicated to tourism. Already on the cover, signed by Tomeu Cabot, is a clear and powerful illustration, with phallic and warlike elements, accompanied by the legend “It’s better in fiction“Inside, in addition to the contributions of Mariscal or Miquel Barcelo, among others, there is a whole series of photographs of a handful of people, characterized in very different ways, who repeat in different languages the phrase ‘For the sake of, don’t come on vacation to Mallorca.’ . “It’s not that we didn’t want tourism, but we called for the idea of moderate tourism,” recalls artist-author Andrew Terradis, who was also one of the magazine’s promoters. He says they sought “the preservation, so to speak, of the indigenous population, not their extinction.”
Sitting in his studio in downtown Palma, where he can occasionally hear the increasingly crowded horn of the train from Soller, he remembers the late 1970s as a period of “tremendous awareness about music.” “Identity, not just the language, but also the land.” “When they wanted to develop Dragonera there was a huge reaction. And like this, there were many others… constructions, highways… mobilizing people before that.” “But I never thought we would get to where we are. I thought there would be more moderation and more control.” Faced with the threat of construction at La Dragonera, Terrades made a series of illustrations titled The masochistic prayer book for mass castration on Capulada Island.
Llorence Villalonga left witness to the irreversible process that the island went through, often using satire as a way of expressing himself.
However, the artist points out some important data, such as the reception of one million tourists – “which happened in September or October; now we have to do it two weeks after the beginning of the year” – or the opening of the thousandth hotel, Hotel Mar Delet – “and how many are there now? Thirty thousand? – As evidence of the change taking place in a reality that had been worrying him for more than forty years, it was in 1976 when Andrew Terradis traveled the distance that separates Son Sant Joan Airport from downtown Palma and made a series of illustrations entitled. Palma 9 km He considered the elements he encountered along the way, such as traffic lights that determined the behavior of vehicles and “monsters” like Eurotours buses. “What we were doing was trying to raise awareness and we thought it would make sense to do that,” he laments, though he is confident that “however, there is always some hope at the end of everything.”
1968
“‘Very’ shit! And all in order to make money!”
On the other hand, it has been more than 50 years since many authors in all kinds of literary works documented the dangers involved in that new model of the world, which, in principle, should not be discussed or questioned because it was assumed to be better than the New to the world. Previous. Bonet de Sant Pere’s songs glorifying the beauty of Mallorca have given way to the tune of Los Mismos’ huge success, the bridgeThey celebrated by building a virtual bridge to enable access to the island by private vehicles. That was when two young men in their early twenties gave the start to an entire generation of writers with their first novels: 39 degrees in the shade Antonia Vicenes W The butcherby Guillem Frontera, both published at the end of the 1960s.
In the first pages of this last book, we already read that “they sacrificed Magdalena, turning her into a mummy who makes a fool of herself all Holy Day before four lowly foreigners, saying:”Typical Spanish“,”Typical Mallorca“,”very very very very“… I very Shit! And all in order to make money.” Specifically, just a few weeks ago, Frontera, when she received Tony Catani’s ARA Balears de Cultura Award, lamented in the same pages that “society has never been deaf to the warnings of its intellectuals.” He said That is with regard to the masses, and the fact is that there are many intellectuals who have pointed this out at different times in the twentieth century and this was done, for example, by the researcher Joan Mascaro i Forness, who asked this in one of the letters he sent to the financier Joan March. 1963: “Have you thought about ruining the beaches and sand beaches of Mallorca with super-tourism? ? “This is terrible for those of us who love Mallorca.”
Llorence Villalonga also bore witness to the irreversible process that the island went through, often with sarcasm as a way of expressing himself. It was the dystopia he published in the early 1970s, which has recently been restored by Adia Edicions, Andrea Victrix, where “Mallorca is no longer called by that name but is called Club Turista de la Mediterrània or, in common parlance, Turclub, which the snobs pronounce Turcloef.” The truth is that humor was also one of the methods most used by creators when denouncing the tourist exploitation of the Balearic Islands.
1988
“Rent to Talaiot for a month”
It was at the end of the 1980s when journalist Carlos Garrido and musician Rafael Ferrer started Mayorcatora musical project that resulted in an album reissued twenty years ago now, in which the history of Mallorca is reimagined from the point of view of tourism with themes such as talayotwhere the island’s early settlers would promote tourist rentals with phrases such as “Rent a taliot for a month, how short vacations always are,” or Burger Road, As they sang that “the selfless person is happy when he doesn’t shoot or sprout / the place he’s in.” The donation itself / Considered international / Al-Ghairi is a tour operator machine. Only a few years later, in 1994, Osivar published his famous book Holidays in Mallorca: “Every day is a party in Mallorca / Every night they’re floating on the sea / These fools who go to the beach / These damned hooligans“.
“Culture has become superficial”
Although Anthony Nicolau, singer and lyricist of the band Ocults, acknowledges that there are interesting works nowadays related to the tourism issue, he says he no longer feels the same desire to denounce. He asserts that “the right has gone further to the right and the left as well, and is faced with a scenario in which those who can defend values fear that they will have a firm position until they retire… everything.” The situation has stabilized and the personal situation is no longer urgent. The children of many of these left-wing officials are devoted to dreaming of trout and searching for beauty and… not all of them, but many of them are disconnected from reality.” For his part, Andrew Teradis admits that he has no connection to the cultural sphere, because he no longer feels a sense of belonging to it: “I think it’s also about the influence of networks, because it creates a whole series of stereotypes which means that there are no differences between the work of some and the work of others. Before, the Germans painted one way, the French painted another way, and everything became more superficial,” he says. This has to do with the aesthetics and the rhetoric, of course.”
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