EXHIBITION​

El modelo vacacional en la costa de Rumania entre los años cincuenta y ochenta, reflejaba  las políticas occidentales del ocio, combinadas con las políticas "correctivas" de la Unión Soviética. Estructurado alrededor del trabajo duro, el sacrificio y la recompensa, el régimen socialista inició la movilización de imágenes y estrategias publicitarias de un nuevo consumismo y felicidad material que tenían como propósito mostrar que la planificación socialista, podía producir placer con igual eficiencia y abundancia. 

Coastland: The Invention of Paradise analyzes and questions the Black Sea socialist vacation paradise by seeking to understand the production of the landscape through operative images. The exhibition reveals the designed and controlled experience of the coast that underlies the tanned bodies, the sandy beaches, the perfect blue skies and the modern architecture of its images where a mediated paradise for the masses is built through postcards, music, radio commercials and films. 

The exhibition presents a collection of official postcards sent between the sixties and eighties, and reads into the different elements that compose them to show the construction of these paradisiac images, and confront them with an equally simulated reality of hyperrealist summer paradises and pockets of presumed utopia. The composition of the territory, architecture, objects and bodies reveal how an ideological apparatus was materialized and executed through the leisure policies and architectures of the regime that produced them. The postcards presented, act as a device that registers the flaws and evidences the inconsistencies between the real and the projected, allowing one to see the hidden but true state of an invented paradise where architecture, propaganda, ideology and simulacra converge on the beach, and the images exhibited are nothing more than the reflection of a material simulation of the real.