It’s the end of the season: The seasonal workers of Tropic Beach, a restaurant at the beach of San Pere Pescador, Spain, smash a clay piggy bank with a metal bar. Three months’ tips come billowing from the crocks. The women start throwing the banknotes and coins into the air, cheering and whooping, and then start to sort the coins. The boss comes in and puts the piles of coppers (1 cent, 2 cent 5 cent) into two plastic bags, then puts them in front of one of the workers who had quit the job earlier than what had originally been planned. Wages in cent pieces: his revenge.

Hay que gastar dinero (“You have to spend money”) is part of a feature length film about the working conditions of women in the tourism industry on the Costa Brava / Spain.

Exhibitions: „TOUR-ISMES – La derrota de la dissensió“, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 3.6.-31.7. 2004 2004; Auszeit/ Arbeit, München, Platforms 3, 2010.

Filmfestivals: Mostra Internacional de Films de Donnes, Barcelona, 2005, Mostra de Films de Donnes, Zaragoza, Spain, 2005.

Text from catalog

“Tour-isms. The Defeat of Dissent investigates different manifestations of tourism to work towards a critical analysis of the influence of this global phenomenon in contemporary society.

Tourism as migration of cultures, objects and people, but also as a new mobility of capitals, cities and history, of fictions, of myths, of discourses and values, and most of all a permanent mobility of images. Tourism conceived as a political and cultural phenomenon, in full expansion thanks to the globalising process of late capitalism which, together with the consumer and leisure society and the information, communication and transport technologies, is radically transforming our territories and (space-time) perception of the world.

A contemporary practice, mobility, yet different according to the place one is speaking from: perpetual present and pure space, deterritorialized, for the globalized; impossibility of the present and physically confined space for the localized. The uses of time and space are clearly differentiated and at the same time they themselves differentiate.

The pursuit of happiness, the desire for escape, the discovery of the Other and the return to nature are, according to some tourism analysts, the generators of the imaginaries of desire when it comes to embarking on a journey. A critical analysis of these constructed imaginaries which will reveal some of the mechanisms which induce that desire in capitalist society has been the impulse behind this project.”

–

Tour-isms. The Defeat of Dissent [EN]

Hablando de turismo by Catalina Sierra [SP]

Press [DE]