![]() Thus, people are not watching the statues, but sculptures are those that are observing with long look and waiting for people to tell their story: They remind us Rilke’s poems, where the human hopes and disappointments are living in places like the gardens where build up an inner world. The sculptures themselves tell the same story, located at ground level, as another visitor. Because of that, the desperate nymphs became elm, willow and poplar, respectively, as we could see them in the garden. According to mythology, Hercules, to become a hero, beat down the dragon and he managed to steal the golden apples from the Garden of the Hesperides. At the same time, the existing urban landscape is now part of the new garden, of the reflection of adjacent trees in water, of palm silhouettes that bind to others in the distance, of the mix of citrus smell in the air, of the guiding geometry.īesides, the garden also talks to visitors and tells them a tale: about Hesperides, the nymphs who guarded the golden apples which Hera had planted in her garden. ![]() There is a sought reciprocity, a dialogue between the garden with its surrounding even from outside the walls, the garden is part of the urban landscape: its trees blend with the vegetation of the Botanical Garden, the green skyline frames the background domes, without hiding or excluding them, but attracting them inside the space. Therefore, we could say that the garden provides a fruitful interaction between surround urban landscape and visitors. Opposite to the main current choice in larger cities of the so-called “green zones”, understood and offered to the citizen as consuming material, our option was to design a garden as a place that would provide a kinder relationship with nature, where contemplation and simple fact of being in the garden are the main targets, knowing we are part of it since the moment we pass through the walls and find ourselves in a different atmosphere. At the same time, this material helps us to rethink the narrative, for these images are reliable evidence that in tourism there is a complex and contradictory multiplicity of representations, searches, desires and aspirations.In fact, the project is just the answer to the questions we have been suggesting, both the specific location of the garden and the purpose of providing new languages to the context of nowadays urban landscape. On the one hand, to show a collection of documents of undeniable cultural interest: posters, leaflets and magazines, together with postcards, photobooks and travel books, mostly obtained from Valencian archives (Biblioteca Valenciana, Archivo documental Pedro Zaragoza, Universidad de Alicante). What this documentary exhibition proposes is a critical but unprejudiced analysis of the visual culture generated in connection with the boom in the Valencian Community. The hegemonic narrative reduces the imagery of tourists to the product that they consume (sun and sea), the government’s actions to a slogan (“Spain is different”) and the subjectivity of the local population to an erotic fantasy (Swedish women). Yet the tourist boom in Spain tends to be trivialised. Few phenomena feature more decisively in all the principal transformations that took place during Franco’s dictatorship.
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