Dream City

When you walk around Salou, you can go from Jamaica to Havana just by crossing the street. And without realizing it, you can pass from Florida to Belo Horizonte to reach Chamonix in just two minutes. Suddenly, you might find yourself between Maracaibo and Caracas, or surrounded by Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza, Corsica, and Sardinia, seeing them all at once. You might even end up arriving at places we thought were lost, like Atlantis or El Dorado. Whether out of a desire to emulate the most coveted holiday destinations or to feel as close as possible to a dreamt paradise, many apartment blocks in Salou and other coastal towns like Cambrils or Calafell are named after tourist destinations around the world: Cancun, California, Antibes, Bahia, Hawaii...

Between a denial of reality and the construction of a dream, different earthly paradises unfold in an implausible cartography. This project uses various techniques—photography, collage, installation, video, and drawing—to contrast the reality of 1960s holiday apartment buildings on the Catalan coast with the illusion of the perfect vacation. It confronts the everyday life of a holiday town with the idealized image conveyed by exotic place names. But at the same time, the act of naming creates a hyperreality that allows us to reinterpret the city through this simulated world.

It is a mythification of certain tourist destinations, shaped by the emerging mass media of the 1960s, eventually leading, as Baudrillard puts it, to the sign (literally) taking the place of reality. Here, Greek islands, Alpine mountains, and South American beaches follow one another, proudly announced by signs that generate this simulacrum.

Dream City refers to the ambiguity this situation creates. The different possible translations into Catalan reveal the polyhedral nature of this reality. On one hand, it could be interpreted as a “dreamed city” or a “dream city”—an idealized place that meets all requirements to be perfect. On the other hand, it could mean a “city for dreaming,” a place suited to pursuing dreams and personal challenges, where the environment supports one’s desires. But it might also be read as a “city made of dreams,” an oneiric city, where things don’t feel real and where the laws of the world as we know them no longer apply.

Salou is all three at once. It’s the place where many have found their perfect vacation spot, where they can fulfill all that they longed to do while waiting to arrive—and at the same time, it is this imaginary city, where time and space operate differently, and where you can go from one end of the world to the other in an instant.