Casa Planas is a research center and cultural epicenter. A hive of workshops and a creative laboratory. It is also a place for artistic exploration and critical reflection. A recording studio, a stage for the performing arts, a space open to debate and, of course, a photographic archive. An immense repository that bears witness to the landscape, economic and cultural transformation of the Balearic Islands.
We owe the imposing archive, which holds more than four million images, to Josep Planas i Montanyà; the rest, the Casa Planas center for research and contemporary culture, to his granddaughter, Marina Planas, who since 2015 has captained this project that has recovered the old Casa Planas factory and turned it into what it is today.
But let's start from the beginning because this story begins in 1945, with the arrival of Josep Planas to Mallorca. Two years after settling on the island, the Catalan founded Casa Planas, a very famous photographic studio on the island that would eventually have 15 different locations. The passion for photography led Planas to capture - together with his team of workers - millions of images: family reportage, weddings, social events, advertising reports, portraits of celebrities - Lola Flores, Joan Miró and Camilo José Cela are just some of them - and, of course, the birth, development and boom of the tourism sector.
"Josep Montanyà configured a very specific type of image of Mallorca, that of saturated blues and greens so recognizable that it became the prototypical image of the island".
With his camera, Planas captured the transformation of the island's coastline and urban development, and unquestionably contributed to generate the unmistakable and idyllic image of the Mallorca of the 50s and 60s, as Marijo Ribas, in charge of the communication area of the current Casa Planas, explains: "Josep Montanyà configured a very specific type of image of Mallorca, that of saturated blues and greens so recognizable that it became the prototypical image of the island".
Those photographs, the ones we have seen so many times in postcards and that have traveled around the world for decades, are the work of Planas i Montanyà who, already settled in Mallorca, was the first European photographer to acquire a helicopter to shoot aerial photography. Now, these postcards -at the time he sold up to 100,000 a year-, are found together with photographs, photolithographs, negatives, gadgets, transparencies and the cameras he collected during his life in this archive that we are lucky enough to visit. We would need whole days to carefully observe each piece of this authentic treasure that keeps and tells the history of tourism and the image of the Balearic Islands in folders, files and drawers, and that can be consulted in the Casa Planas Creation Center, located in Avinguda de Sant Ferran in Palma.
"The former photography laboratories have been converted into 17 workshops that are rented to artists. They work here and we try to give them visibility."
As we said, the project to reconvert this building into a creative and interdisciplinary workshop is the work of Marina Planas, Josep's granddaughter, who conceived it "in response to the urgent need for a center of contemporary creation and interpretation about tourism in the Balearic Islands." Eight years later, this creative factory offers spaces for resident artists from different disciplines -photography, dance, audiovisuals, performing arts- in order to promote creation and support the different artistic circuits of the island. Currently, as Ribas tells us, "the former photography laboratories have been converted into 17 workshops that are rented out to artists. They work here and we try to give them visibility on the website and through social networks".
In addition to the magnificent archive, coworking spaces and workshops open to members and the community, the center offers a program of research residencies for national and international artists, in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut, and with the support of local institutions such as the Teatre Principal. The aim of these grants is to generate spaces for reflection, research and artistic creation, and to dynamize the Planas archive, available to resident artists.
The idea was Marina's -also an artist and researcher herself- who "conceived her grandfather's archive as a platform for experimentation and research not only of her own artistic production, but also opened it to other artists to generate new discourses and approaches". Thus, artists have access to all the material in the archive to carry out their work. For example, the surprising work of the Mallorcan creator Sergio Monje, Todas las costas posibles, who trained from the postcards of the Planas archive an artificial intelligence tool capable of recreating a fictitious imaginary of the Balearic coast -the one that could have been-, thus generating a parallel archive to the real archive of Casa Planas.
Undoubtedly, Josep Planas i Montanyà was a visionary who knew how to capture, before anyone else, the relationship between image and tourism, and to record the transformation of the Balearic territory, culture and society decade after decade. He captured our past with a click, which undoubtedly determines our collective present. Now it is Marina who picks up the baton of his grandfather and gives a return to that invaluable work in order to generate synergies, build bridges, incite reflections and create art. A valuable legacy that deserves to be recognized at the same level.
