The advertising billboards that portray us as a society
There is a simple way to understand what Mallorca is today: arrive at Palma airport and look at the advertising panels, what they show, what they sell. Also those on the island's roads, the islands'. The advertisements explain more about the Balearic economic and social model than many speeches. Advertising not only sells products, it also constructs a narrative about who we are and what place we occupy in the world.
The gateways to the Islands are the first declaration of intent. There, without blushing, coexist messages that appeal to sustainability – current derivatives of Santiago Rusiñol's 'island of calm' cooked with contemporary environmentalism – with other messages that exploit the image of the Islands – especially Mallorca and Ibiza – as a theme park of excess. A car rental company turns the name of the main island into a pun – ‘MA-YOUR-CAR’ – and a German bank dared to present Mallorca as a kind of Las Vegas with the slogan ‘what happens in Malle, stays in Malle’. Recently, too, a real estate agency advertised Mallorca as a Game of Homes, an ideal land for residential speculation. And some students were greeted with a demeaning ‘In Mallorca, you eat it all’.
These are not anecdotal cases, they are part of our landscape. And what they convey is that everything here is for sale. The territory, housing, identity, language, and even the most offensive stereotypes. The implicit message is devastating: the Balearic Islands exist above all to satisfy the desires of others, of tourists, of investors, of foreign buyers, and of large capital.
The large billboards are not decoration, but rather they define a country and contribute to normalizing certain values. If in any European airport it would be unthinkable to turn the territory into a caricature at the service of visitors, here we have accepted it as an inevitable consequence of the tourism business.
The question is whether it really is an inevitable consequence. Because just as there are urban, landscape, and heritage regulations, it is also legitimate to ask whether the advertising that occupies the most visible spaces should respond to minimum criteria of social and cultural respect. It is not a matter of censoring advertisements, but of assuming that public spaces cannot be entirely subjected to the logic of the market. Furthermore, when there has been social reaction, the advertisement has been withdrawn.
The Balearic Islands have for too long been viewed through the eyes of those who come to consume them. The signs only make visible a much deeper submission: that of an economy that has ended up accepting that almost everything has a price. Perhaps the time has come to reclaim the right to decide also what the landscape we offer the world says about us.
