MARINA PLANAS ANTICH “CASA PLANAS: ARCHIVES AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY”

Language: English

Duration: 1–1,5 h

What happens when a family archive becomes the starting point for a critical reflection on tourism, identity, and collective memory? In this lecture, artist and archival researcher Marina Planas Antich presents Casa Planas – a center for artistic research and contemporary image practices, based on an extensive private archive of postcards. Amidst the mass production of holiday imagery, she opens up a surprising perspective on the mechanisms of visual culture and how touristic image worlds inscribe themselves deeply into social imaginaries.

The lecture invites the audience on a journey through Marina Planas Antich’s visual family archive. At its center are historical postcards from the 1950s to the 1970s – silent witnesses to the formation of a touristic gaze on Mallorca. From these seemingly harmless images emerges a dense narrative of longing, cliché, and cultural layering.

Planas Antich explores how photographic media contribute to the construction of touristic utopias – and how these images have a lasting impact on our collective memory. In an interplay between archival material, theory, and artistic practice, she shows how stereotypical representations are inscribed into landscapes and identities – and how art and research can serve as tools to render these processes visible and open them up for critical reflection.

This talk is part of the program “Hidden Archives: Tourism, Photography and Collective Memory” (June 28/29 in Frankfurt, September 18–20 in Mallorca) and offers a solid theoretical foundation for the themes explored in the accompanying workshop.

Marina Planas Antich (*1983, Palma de Mallorca) is a visual artist, archival researcher, and director of the independent art and research center Casa Planas in Mallorca. She studied Audiovisual Communication at Universitat Ramon Llull and Photography, Video & Related Media at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, where she received the Alice Beck-Odette Scholarship.

The granddaughter of Josep Planas i Muntanyà – one of the most prominent photographers of Mallorca’s postwar tourism era – she now manages the extensive Planas Archive, a collection of over three million images regarded as a visual memory of Spain’s tourism boom. The archive is located in her grandfather’s former studio and photographic laboratory in Palma de Mallorca and forms the heart of the Centro de Investigación y Cultura Contemporánea Casa Planas.

From this collection, she develops artistic, curatorial, and research-based projects that explore the function of images in processes of collective memory. Her practice combines archival material, photography, essay film, installation, and participatory art forms into a critical visual discourse on cultural appropriation, sustainability, and identity construction in the context of touristic image production.

Since 2017, she has directed the Art Investigation Programme at Casa Planas, which invites international artists and theorists for residencies and collaborative formats. Her work has been shown at institutions such as Museu Es Baluard (Palma), Houston FotoFest, Centre d’Arts Santa Mònica (Barcelona), Anthology Film Archive (New York), Cortona on the Move, and the Venice Biennale. She has received numerous grants and fellowships, including from the Consell de Mallorca and the Pilar Juncosa & Sotheby’s Residency Program, and served as Vice President of the Asociación de Artistas Visuales de las Islas Baleares.