There was a time when we scratched our arms with a firecracker to carve an initial, so that when the toasted scab fell off, the memory of falling in love would remain; when we rejoiced in getting a little burned at Patum or the correfoc (fire run) during the festivities, a sign that we had played with fire; a time when the anecdote of a lost tooth or the stigma of a vaccine or illness gave character to the body and color to speech; when we wore lucky t-shirts and bracelets, frayed to be woven with history; and even at home, there was a time when stains, cracks, and junk represented experience, meaning. Today, what we have are advertisements that assure us that "life doesn't need to leave a mark": that we can and should try to avoid the traceable memory, the meaning, of our actions.
Under the pretext of heritage conservation, after decades of keeping the properties closed and fenced, with the furniture covered and the glassware and cutlery intact, the owners now allow everything to be used by tourist families who, week after week, wear and tear and leave traces of wear and tear. Some will try to erase them at the end of the season, to rent them out again the following year; the rest become the only reminders of these properties, tables and tablecloths, condemned to be worth nothing more than money to their "true" owners. The antique linen fabrics that Mateu Coll intervenes and resurrects in the exhibition have been saved from this evil fate. Wanting and hurting, curated by Aba Art, at the Hotel Fontsanta in Campos. The Pollença artist, a keen listener to the souls of accumulated and abandoned objects with equal eagerness, has preserved inherited canvases and adopted others throughout the island; and now, with the eyes and hands of a poet, he returns them to the world of the living with a revived spirit.
Meanwhile, at the Galería Maior in Pollença, curator Esmeralda Gómez similarly proposes that memory is not a fixed structure or an archive, but rather "a dynamic flow that moves through bodies and materials." She has reread, with their authors, works by Lara Fluxà, Eva Lootz, Clàudia Pagès, Susana Solano, and Laia Ventayol for the exhibition Memory is a streamFluxà's pieces, animated by the energy that engenders them, reverberate. A rebellious twig screams from the leg of the stool Lootz tried to turn into a tree. Pagès's fans move the air with echoes of Hawaii, Bali, and Cape Verde, among others—we don't know exactly—through the shells she has collected on Catalan beaches with regenerated sand. The hue of the artisanal mulberry trees in Ventayol evokes a green Germany that welcomed young artists like herself more than a decade ago. Trails of memories end in a torrent of memory that skips the linearity of time and transits a less defined space. The questioning and mutation of her creations make the ideas of the authors (and the observer) sprout again in a form that can no longer be the first but that contains it.
Many fellow musicians say they haven't listened to their own album again after recording it. Many fellow writers also assure me that they never reread a text of theirs once it's published; that they don't even remember it. This is not the case with the poet from Ferrero, Damià Rotger, who is committed to looking at our lyrics and our landscape with eyes that question what, although it may appear the same, is always different, due to the changes we provoke and what living it provokes in us: the coves, the posidonia, and the sand of the coves; the places, the shape, and the people of the places; the language and the words; in his eighth book, Elemental nature (City of Xàtiva award, Bromera, 2025), are the same as always, but they exist and speak in an evolved form that leaves its mark, because it contains the trace of what they were and what they may come to be.
Some time ago, one day early, after a good walk, I dived naked (which is how they used to swim in the Tramuntana), and a specimen of Pelagia noctiluca It gripped its tentacles on my left breast, greeting me with an electric shock. I displayed the jellyfish scar all summer, while spreading a magnificent tale of survival on the brink. I learned that grumeros are born as polyps that cling sedentarily to rocks, then mature and embark on their oceanic adventure, following a collectively inherited knowledge and in its most familiar bell shape. That life is rich thanks to the physical transformations we experience: in humans, the morphology of the brain varies as it incorporates learning. Today, the mark on my skin and the calligram I dedicated to that terminal remind me how to distinguish its species in the middle of the sea, the remedies for the wound, all its names; and what a summer in Mallorca was like in 2009.
