Interview with Marina Planas

For the exhibition Out of Office (Still Here) Quiller MacQuarrie conducted interviews with interested artists. This interview is with Marina Planas, the artist behind Happy Holidays. This piece is a photo series of archival postcards portraying the Balearic islands. Planas contemplates the distortion of the tourism industry and its effect on local communities.

Quiller:

How do you see your work connecting to the themes of the exhibition — access to free time and leisure in relation to summer vacation?

Marina:

It connects a lot, both in terms of the work itself and the effects tourism has on over-touristed areas like Mallorca, where about 90% of income comes from tourism. My work analyzes the effects on places that depend entirely on one industry — and such an extractivist industry at that.

I’m mainly focused on environment and gender as my central issues, and I also analyze how images influence desire — how touristic images are created, what the clichés are, and where they come from historically. I also look at how capitalism and power function in terms of going to poorer countries, and how large capitalist structures can have enormous negotiating power over countries with fewer resources. I’m interested in how development starts in places with no existing infrastructure — how tourism expanded in Africa, how it expanded in Latin America, how it started here in the Balearic Islands. Those dynamics of capitalism and neoliberalism interest me a lot.

So it’s a mix of global economics, environment, and the effects on residents living in over-touristed areas — and always with an analysis of the image behind it all.

Even summertime here has become complicated. There used to be a wish — they called it desestacionalización in Spanish, meaning not being dependent on only the summer season. Workers wanted to be paid year-round. That was the dream in the 80s and 90s. Now it’s happened, but it’s become worse — there’s tourism all the time. Cyclists come in spring, and while they’re considered better tourism than cruise ships or golf, they still create traffic that makes it hard to take your kids to school or get to work. Real life things.

Quiller:

Does your artistic practice feel more like leisure/play or work and labor?

Marina:

More work and labor. I analyze how women have been used in touristic imagery — how the female body was used to attract visitors. Here, a woman on a postcard was something to be used, like the beach itself. You can use the beach, you have fun, and then the woman is there too. It’s not framed as work or labor, but it is a use of the woman’s body. And there is labor behind it — including prostitution, which exists here even if it’s not as visible as in other destinations.

You can trace this evolution in the postcards. In the 1960s, women in bikinis were already selling this idea — beauty, availability. Here we were just coming out of Franco’s regime, so a woman in a bikini was itself transgressive at the time. By the 90s it had evolved into topless imagery, and then into something far more demeaning. There were actual competitions — conquest contests — where the prize for the winner would be free drinks for the night, and this practice was happening as recently as ten years ago.

It all traces back to the 60s, when club owners would go to the beach, find women who had come from abroad, and invite them in with the promise of a prize for being the prettiest. That evolved over decades into something much more exploitative. So it’s the exploitation of the female body alongside the exploitation of the land — the objectification of both the woman and the territory. In capitalism it’s always this extractivist logic: they objectify the earth and they objectify women.

Quiller:

What is your favorite memory from a summer period?

Marina:

My favorite memory is from the summers I spent at a beach house in Cala Sant when I was young. I was never a girl who liked to sit in the sand — I have freckles and blue eyes and I’m pretty fair, so I didn’t like to spend hours in the sun. But I loved climbing rocks, watching crabs, swimming along the rocks. There was this particular spot where a cave’s middle section had collapsed, creating a kind of natural stone bridge. You could go there and be completely alone — only locals knew about it. The water was clean and cool and clear. You could swim underneath the stone arch. It was the kind of place tourists dream of, and we had it to ourselves.

I went back there as an adult and it had become a theme park. There were people zip-lining, people doing canoe excursions, jet skis, fast boats, loud music. No space. And it’s like your own life reflects the passing of time and this touristic boom. That transformation has happened in the last 15 years — before that, I could still go. Now I go in winter, or I find other hidden spots. I swim in the sea in winter just to avoid it all.

Quiller:

What do you like to do with your free time?

Marina:

I like to travel, but to strange places — places where no one goes. Extremadura, for example. Sometimes I end up in touristy places because friends want to go, but then it becomes work, because my mind starts turning and I start taking notes and thinking about projects. I went to a concentration camp in Siberia and people were asking, “What are you doing here?” There are no tourists there.

In my free time more generally, I like the mountains, dancing, yoga. Things that let me breathe.

Quiller:

How does the leisure industry and tourism connect to your practice?

Marina:

The whole foundation of my practice is the archive my grandfather built. He generated the entire touristic imagery for the Balearic Islands during the tourism boom — the main place Spain was promoting internationally. He worked with the Ministry of Tourism under Franco, specifically with Fraga, who was the Minister of Tourism and Information.

My grandfather came to Mallorca for his military service, fell in love with the landscape, saw that there could be a business in photography, and opened the first photography shop on the island. From there it grew — he eventually had 25 shops across the island and a monopoly on postcards in the Balearic Islands. He was trained in Germany and introduced color photography to the islands, and was one of the first people to introduce color in Spain more broadly. He was also the operator of Spanish national television’s color cameras at a time when Spanish TV was still broadcasting in black and white. He even had a helicopter — believed to be the first European photographer to acquire one specifically for aerial photography — and rented it to the police on weekends because the police didn’t have one.

So he was very much part of the machinery that constructed this touristic vision of the islands, producing all the advertising for hotels, publications for the Ministry of Tourism, and all the imagery that drove the boom.

Quiller:

How did you go about choosing specific photos from such an expansive archive?

Marina:

The first time, it was overwhelming — I just went in without a plan, because it was too much. My initial approach was a small gesture of reframing and relooking, because for me reframing is re-looking. That’s at the core of my whole practice: looking, reframing, putting images in different orders with different meanings, recontextualizing them.

I was thinking a lot about image translation and how an image can be translated endlessly. As time passes, more things can be said about an image. History shifts, perspectives change, and every ten years something new can be read into the same photograph. Now I approach the archive with more specific projects, but that first piece came from just beginning to handle the material.

I also opened the archive to other artists through a residency, because looking is something other people can do too — bringing their own interpretations and translations to the same images. That collective dimension became part of the work.

Quiller:

How did the Franco dictatorship and the “Spanish Miracle” affect Spain’s current tourist landscape, and how is this reflected in your archive?

Marina:

After the Second World War, Europe needed to rebuild and eventually create what would become the European Union. Northern countries had established industries, but southern countries — Spain, Greece, and to a lesser degree Italy — had very little. Spain especially needed an economic strategy. At the same time, paid vacation had just been regulated across Europe for the first time, meaning workers now had the legal right to holiday. So there was both a supply problem — southern countries needed income — and a new demand from northern workers who now had time and some means to travel.

The European framework essentially designated southern countries as leisure destinations. The Balearic Islands were the test case, and it worked so well that the model was expanded throughout southern Europe and eventually the world. That’s how we became home to some of the largest hotel groups in the world — Meliá, Barceló, Iberostar, Riu, Piñero — all originating on this small island.

Franco used this boom to clean up his image. In 1964, for the 20th anniversary of what he called “20 years of peace,” a major new hotel was inaugurated here — and they even falsified the opening date to align it with the anniversary. It was a propaganda strategy: tourism as proof of stability and progress under his regime.

You can see all of this in the archive. You can see aerial photographs showing roads being constructed to reach touristic spots where there had been no infrastructure at all. When I visited the Pacific coast of Mexico recently, I could see the exact same pattern — newly built hotels and brand new roads leading only to them. When tourism arrives somewhere with nothing, it doesn’t just add hotels. It reshapes the entire landscape, the roads, the city planning, everything.

Here, there are photographs showing a beautiful tree-lined promenade with a historic theater, and then the next photographs show them tearing down the theater and removing the trees so tourists could have an unobstructed view of the sea. The city becomes a stage set. It’s not the real place anymore — it’s a constructed version of itself, like Disneyland. And the archive lets you see the construction happening in real time.

Quiller:

Does Ariella Azoulay’s theory of photography as a commercializing tool for imperialism resonate with your archive research?

Marina:

Absolutely — and you can see it directly in the archive because we left everything as it was. We didn’t touch it, so all the notations are still there showing how my grandfather was correcting colors to make images more attractive. He would note: make the blue more intense, change the swimming costume from blue to red so it catches the eye against the sea. Everything was staged — if there wasn’t a branch of an almond tree in a composition, he would add one. In arid areas that were under construction, he would instruct the lab to add green.

Then there’s the sky envelope. In interviews my grandfather claimed he would wait patiently for the perfect cloud formation before pressing the shutter. But we found an envelope of fake skies in the archive. On ugly days, they would simply composite in a better sky in the lab. It was a painting, not a photograph.

The production process for the postcards makes this even clearer. The transparencies were sent to the Barcelona printer divided into cyan, magenta, yellow, and black — and many of them had a double blue layer specifically to intensify the blues of the sea and sky. So the image was constructed at every stage: in the staging, in the shooting, in the lab corrections, and in the printing.

Yet, paradoxically, those same images also function as historical documents. Many of the hotels in those photographs have been demolished or completely refurbished, and the archive preserves their original architecture, their interiors, their furniture, the swimming pools, and every point of view. So you can analyze them simultaneously as construction and as documentation.

This connects directly to what’s happening now. The postcard was the instrument of desire in my grandfather’s time. Today it’s Instagram and algorithmically targeted advertising. There’s actually neuroscientific research in which electromagnetic readers measure brain responses to images, and the images that trigger the strongest emotional reactions are the ones selected for advertising — they bypass rational thinking and appeal directly to our most instinctive responses. We’re exhausted from work, we need a break, we see a beautiful image, and we book without thinking. Then we arrive and we’re standing in a crowd asking ourselves why we came. We fell for it. But then the postcard was doing exactly the same thing, just with a different technology.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​