Lluís Vecina Rufiandis. Happy the Children of Intranscendent Times

This installation by Lluís Vecina Rufiandis has its starting point in certain specific biographical details of two individuals: the photographer Joan Andreu Puig Farran, and the hotelier Jaume Moll.

These two men converge at a specific location on the island of Mallorca, the Sa Coma beach. It is an emblematic space, as in 1936 it was where Spanish Republican troops landed during the Civil War, while from the 1980s onward it became a site for mass tourism.

History has it that when Puig Farran was a war correspondent, he covered the landing at Sa Coma. During the 1950s, he became a commercial photographer and set up a business producing postcards, which allowed him to photograph these same historical sites after their conversion into locations for hotels. One of these many hotels was an imposing block built by Jaume Moll, a businessman who had become wealthy during the Franco years.

The installation by Vecina Rufiandis brings to light these overlays of different periods or time, showing how the phenomenon of tourism occults a massive operation by the Franco regime, where behind the pretence of upholding the benefits of modernising the country, the physical territory was eroded, along with its historical memory. It should be kept in mind, furthermore, that the hotel complex is located on the exact site of the largest mass grave from the war on the island.

The central feature is a large-format mosaic panel where we can see the oversize reproduction of a postcard of the Hotel Royal Mediterráneo, produced precisely by the company of Joan Andreu Puig Farran.

Further features accompany the installation, such as a set of 500 postcards in representation of the 500 militiamen who perished during the landing, as well as audiovisual archival material and the sound ambience created by Toni Llull. These components come together to create a spatial dimension where various periods of time are set in juxtaposition, revealing the many faces of a living history, as expressed in a single island landscape.

Lluís Vecina Rufiandis (Porto Cristo, Mallorca, 1995) studied Fine Arts at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He has worked as an external researcher at MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. More recently, he completed the Independent Studies Programme (PEI) at MACBA.

In parallel, he collaborates habitually with the Observatori de la Vida Quotidiana [Observatory of Everyday Life] and is a member of Col·lectiu Recerca [Research Collective], a group comprised of a heterogeneous team of professionals centred on research, study, debate and public information related to the Second Republic, the Spanish Civil War and repression under the Franco regime.