After more than two years of work, and more than a decade since the disappearance of Palma Photo, Mallorca PhotoFest has been born, a festival promoted by the Art Palma Contemporani association that will fill, until next August, thirty exhibition points throughout the island with contemporary photography proposals. “The long-term objective is to make it a benchmark where we can reflect on images, where we can foster critical thinking through photography. 100 years ago it was a source of unquestionable authority and trust, and now it is used to distort reality. We believe it is necessary to reflect on this, that images should also help us draw conclusions about the world we live in.” This is how Xavier Fiol, director of the festival, defines it, who together with the general coordinator, Montserrat Torras, and with the advice of Xisco Bonnín and Horacio Fernández, have shaped a program that includes exhibitions, talks, guided tours, a book club dedicated to photobooks, and a film cycle that will take place during May at the Teatre Sa Societat in Calvià.Among the exhibitions that will be inaugurated in the coming weeks within the framework of PhotoFest, in addition to the four included in the Galàxia Fontcuberta project, are the first photographic exhibition hosted by Galeria 6a, La trinchera, by Aitor Lara, the exhibition Miquel Salom i els pioners de la fotografia, which can be seen from April 29 at Can Bordils, and that of Tomeu Coll, Entre flors i fantasmes, which opens on May 21 at Espai Passatemps in Santa Maria. However, some of the exhibition proposals linked to this festival have been visible for weeks in various centers, such as Horta Picasso - Miró Montroig by Jean Marie del Moral, at Fundació Miró Mallorca, and Holy by Donna Ferrato at Casal Solleric.The program will also reach municipalities such as Alaró, Felanitx, and Inca, and will feature names such as Martin Parr, Josep Planas i Montanyà, and Man Ray, among others. “For me, this festival is the demonstration that, in cultural management, when you add one and one, it's not always two, but rather you multiply the possibilities,” shares Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta, general director of Culture and Tourism of Cort, who highly values the initiative. “I believe it shows a very accurate understanding of the moment in which the Balearic Islands, in general, and Mallorca, in particular, find themselves, where communication between art centers, museums, and artistic spaces has generated a network that I believe is very positive for everyone.”
The Majorcan almond trees killed by xylella, epicentre of the ‘Fontcuberta Galaxy’
The Toni Catany Foundation, the Solleric cultural center and the Xavier Fiol gallery inaugurate exhibitions by the prestigious photographer and essayist Joan Fontcuberta
PalmaIt is just another almond tree. One of the thousands scattered across the Mallorcan geography that have defined its landscape and, therefore, its culture and identity for centuries. Specifically, since the end of the 18th century. Filtered through Joan Fontcuberta (Barcelona, 1955), however, it is many other things, without ceasing to be, precisely, an almond tree. It is a sculptural figure, which alludes to a human presence, perhaps the naked body of a woman, and at the same time it is a kind of zombie, an anonymous and forgotten vestige: a part of the remains left by the Xylella fastidiosa catastrophe in the Mallorcan countryside. It is a relic, and also a prophecy, which is difficult to distinguish whether it comes from the dream world or the real one.
This is just one of the photographs that make up the series Portraying Trees
, which the prestigious photographer and essayist created during the autumn of 2025 in Llucmajor, as part of a workshop organized by the Fundació Toni Catany CIF, where, starting this April 29, its results can be seen for the first time. There are more unsettling and phantasmagorical ones, others that are more poetic and evocative, but in all of them there is a captivating beauty. That speaks to us and seeks to disturb us. "We are here, look at us," all these trees portrayed by Joan Fontcuberta seem to say. And the allusion to portraiture, traditionally associated with the representation of people, makes the author's intentions with these photographs more than clear. Portraying Trees is Fontcuberta's first series in Mallorca – the artist announced that he would donate it to the Fundació Toni Catany – and it is also part of one of the three exhibitions opening this spring on the island within the framework of Galàxia Fontcuberta, an exhibition project with three of his collections linked to the Mallorca PhotoFest festival.
Grammars of the Anomalous
“I was friends with Toni Catany”, recounts the photographer, winner of the National Photography Award and also the National Essay Award, “and for a long time I wanted to do something related to him”. “When I visited the Toni Catany Foundation in Llucmajor, I realized the situation of the almond trees killed by xyllela. Seeing these tortured shapes they generated, it seemed to me that they would have inspired Toni. That if he had lived it, he would have wanted to do something with it, so I set out to portray these trees as he would have done today”, he confesses. The use of paper negatives and canvases that serve to generate the idea of an artificial background, of an outdoor photographic studio, as well as the inclusion of dryads, nymphs associated with trees and Mediterranean mythology, have allowed these images to connect with both still lifes and portraits by Toni Catany, as well as with the techniques of the historic photographer Tomàs Montserrat –a neighbor of Catany in Llucmajor–, without forgetting Fontcuberta's very personal touch.
“The idea of portraying dying, or dead, trees in the middle of the field, as if they were portraits of people in the photographer’s studio, is a form of approach to those grammars of the anomalous that are characteristic of Joan Fontcuberta’s imago mundi”, says the writer and collaborator of ARA Balears Sebastià Alzamora in one of the texts accompanying the exhibition, Flors d’ametller per a Catany i Fontcuberta. Furthermore, Alzamora quotes some verses by Aina Cohen, a famous character created by Llorenç Villalonga, which help to underline one of the axes that run through the entire career of the Catalan photographer: the game (or conflict?) between reality and fiction, between truth and fantasy. When René Magritte wrote almost a hundred years ago that the pipe he had drawn was not a pipe, Joan Fontcuberta’s photographs remind us that we are obliged to ask ourselves if it still makes sense, or even if it is still possible, to distinguish between representation and reality.
Penetrating reality
In fact, it is precisely around this axis that the main link between the three exhibitions that make up Galàxia Fontcuberta: La Via Làctia –with Retratar arbres–, at the Toni Catany Foundation, Wunderkammer, at the Solleric cultural center, and Orquídeas y macarras, at the Xavier Fiol gallery. When asked about the origins of this fascination with exploring the limits of what we consider real, the photographer points to two autobiographical elements. On the one hand, his studies in Journalism and Advertising, which led him to detect "the mechanisms of knowledge transmission" used by authority platforms and to want to turn his artistic work "into a form of activism to not continue practicing these persuasion techniques and to teach the mechanisms of deception." On the other hand, he speaks of the time lived under dictatorship:
The will to transcend appearances has accompanied him throughout his career, as demonstrated by the exhibitions Wunderkammer and La Via Làctia, which bring together photographs from various projects and different stages of the artist's work. The first, which opens on April 30 at Solleric, will feature images from series linked to Jules Verne, the Book of Genesis, and the first explorers of the American continent, many of them developed with artificial intelligence tools. It also includes some works from series such as Herbarium, from 1982, with fake photographs of plants actually made from waste, or What Darwin missed, which combines real photographs of corals, one of the species Darwin used to shape the theory of evolution, with others generated artificially. "The journey is conceived as if following the itinerary of a cabinet of curiosities," explains Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta, general director of Culture and Tourism of Cort and one of the exhibition's curators, "where unique, curious, or strange elements appear, which, however, are related to fauna, botany, and geology. Fontcuberta's work always refers to the union of science and art, without neglecting that magical, fantastic addition, which causes concepts to lose their objective definition and require others."
An efficient cyclops
Regarding La Via Làctia, in Llucmajor, it is one of the photographer's most recent works, a "project of projects" arising from his review of his archive during the pandemic, a time when he decided to extract some of his works from their original context to give them new life. The backbone of this exhibition, in any case, is Pablo Neruda's poem "Ode to the Laboratory Worker," which begins thus: "There is a man / hidden / with a single eye / of an efficient cyclops." As Antoni Garau, director of the Fundació Toni Catany, where this exhibition opens on April 29, says, it is impossible not to think of Joan Fontcuberta when reading them.
Finally, the latest piece that makes up Galàxia Fontcuberta, a project that takes over from Paysage Miró
as a major exhibition proposal with various venues and interpretations surrounding the work of the same artist, is the exhibition "Orquídeas y Macarras," which can be seen from May 2 at the Xavier Fiol gallery in Palma. The viewer will find a dozen large-format diptychs made up of a character and a flower. In all of them, one of the two elements will be real, one that existed on the other side of the camera lens, and the other, a lie, artificially created. "It is an invitation to take a poetic journey regarding verisimilitude," synthesizes the artist. A phrase that is applicable to all of his work and, therefore, to this new system of stars, gas, and dust in the form of photographs that this spring will broaden the artistic universe of Mallorca.