Carme Planells: "I would like 'Enlloc' to serve to reflect on the arrogance of rulers"

IbizaTwenty years ago, in Ibiza, it was a topic of debate what is or is not a motorway. And not just a debate: a discussion, a fierce dispute. The macro-project to widen the roads to the airport and to Sant Antoni, which Jaume Matas promoted in his second term in the Balearic Government (2003-2007), managed to make us Ibizans experts in mobility, roads, and the environment. It also managed to get more than 20,000 people to take to the streets on February 17, 2006, against the macro-project. Now, twenty years later, clubbers and residents cross the blue motorways that Matas commissioned (or dual carriageways or widenings or expanded roads, whatever you want to call them) to get equally stuck at the entrance to Vila. Now, twenty years later, hardly anyone remembers the 'anti-motorway' activists. Almost. By chance or destiny, the playwright and philologist Carme Planells has won the La Carrova theatre prize (awarded outside the Balearic borders, in Amposta) with the play Enlloc, a piece of documentary theatre that pays homage to the historic Ibizan mobilization between 2003 and 2006. The mobilization did not stop the motorways, but it did have political consequences: in 2007, both Jaume Matas and Pere Palau (who was then president of the Consell d’Eivissa) lost the elections.

Enlloc, a peculiar name for a play set in one of the most popular tourist destinations in the Mediterranean. Was it irony?

— The truth is no. I had to give a title to a project and it occurred to me Elsewhere because I had been reading a lot about non-places, those spaces that do not have a social function and that, therefore, cannot be considered any place: some hotels, roads, highways... The non-place would be the highway.

What motivated you to bring the anti-highway movement to the stage?

— All the conflict that was created, the enormous reaction that there was in Ibiza; you already know how we islanders are, it's very hard to get us out of our homes; we always think we'll see, that in the end it will all be for the best... And these demonstrations were the most numerous that took place in Ibiza. And also because of the arrogance of the people who governed at that time, who did not pay attention, who saw that people were protesting, but they continued exactly the same. I remember the excavators about to knock down Ca na Palleva, a house 200 years old. I wanted to reflect on how easy it is to destroy and how difficult it is to build something worthwhile. And the manipulation, the manichaeism: either you are with me or against me; either it's this "or going back to the cart", they said. The anti-motorway activists, a massive movement of normal people, were compared to the kale borroka. And also because the motorways mark a before and after in Ibiza; from then on everything takes off, saturation arrives... The two events that have marked life in Ibiza in recent decades have been the construction of the motorways and the inauguration of Ushuaïa.

The play is based on real events, but begins with a meeting of politicians with a marked air of farce.

— Yes, I was looking for this comedic air, especially in the case of politicians, and also because it was a way to gain distance, and because sometimes it's better to laugh than to cry. If you look at it coldly, the fight was lost and the highway was built. To avoid falling into something too dramatic or too sentimental, I preferred the politicians' part to take on a farcical tone.

It is not the first time you have tackled historical themes, you already did it with Llum trencada, about the Francoist repression of women in Mallorca. How did you do it to document yourselves in the case of Enlloc?

— I started from documentation and interviews with people involved in the movement and also with the politicians who were there, from one side and the other, with people who were in favor and people who were against it. Then you fictionalize it a bit, because you don't mention Toni or Joan in particular, but rather invent a name. Between documentation and writing, I spent a year and a half on it.

The highways are already built. Do you think a play can help change something?

— It is quite difficult to remove all of this. I would like it to help to see it in perspective, that it serves to reflect on the arrogance of rulers, on how private interests are sometimes mixed with public ones; a reflection on whether we should continue on this path of loss of identity and turning the island into a theme park or if we are in time to preserve something. But not to turn ourselves into a museum. The highways were so that we all circulated better, but to enter Vila there are horrific queues. They have only helped to have more cars. Ibiza is a very small space, it is not the same to build a highway in the middle of Europe as to build it in Ibiza. The politicians who were in charge at that time lost perspective. The work can no longer remove the highways, we all know how the story ended. But from this ending, we can sound an alarm about where all this has led us.