Holiday City by Adrià Goula
Bello Horizonte, Bahia, Alaska, Antibes, Atlantida, Jamaica, Samoa, Alexandria, Flandria, Athos, La Colina, Chamonix, Florida, Santillana, Atlas III, Puerto-Rico, Malvinas, Anafi, Lepanto, Cerdeña, Cibeles, Aragón, Malta, Capri, Ischia, Delfos, Paradis, Cala Dorada, Ilerda, Formentor, Sorolla.
The list above is based on names from Adrià Goula’s photographic series. The 30-photograph series is called “Holiday Cities” and Adrià took them in Catalan coastal villages. These housing developments were built near the end of Franco’s dictatorship in the late 60s and 70s. They were planned as second homes for the middle-class population living in larger cities, such as Barcelona, Tarragona or Lleida, and ultimately for foreigners, who were beginning to be welcomed to Spain during the slow decline of Franco’s regime.
Adrià Goula’s photographs emphasize this problematic place that emerges with postmodernism, where traditional representation has caved in and models have stopped being real and are rooted in the media. In this sense, every representation comes from another representation, and copies come from other copies. The real, the original, the unique, the aura… they have almost disappeared from our lives, which are now fueled by the consumption of beautiful simulacra. Adrià’s buildings have lost their connection to their own site, just as they never had any kind of relationship with their toponymy, except perhaps for a slightly evocative simulacrum: Bello Horizonte, Bahia, Alaska, Antibes…
Text by Enric Llorach, architect and writer. In 2017, Enric Llorach published the book En el filo de la navaja. Arte, arquitectura y anacronismo.