Apocalypse-Calipso

Abstract

This visual essay is a mash-up of illustrations, a cultural criticism made up of a non-narrative concatenation of music discs, magazine cover, press photos, postcards, advertisements and movie posters remakes, all from the decades of the 60s, 70s and 80s, that takes Benidorm as a paradigm of massive construction and of cultural and visual transformation from late Francoism until the s. XXI. The graphic tour conceptualizes an extractivist imaginary that analyzes the changes between image, culture and petromodernity derived from tourism, globalization, mass consumption and the rise of disposable goods, the empire of souvenir and kitsch, or pop and theme park aesthetics, in an increasingly artificial and less sustainable environment.

The etymological game between apocalypse and Calypso (Caribbean musical genre and nymph daughter of the titan Atlas who reigned on the island of Ogigia, and therefore sister of the Hesperides, the Hyades and the Pleiades), fosters, in crescendo, a reflection between the veiled and the revealed, the bikini and the topless, the idyllic and the contaminated, through the retro-futuristic prophecy of a natural pop aquatic catastrophe.

This project is a derivation, in COVID-19 times, of our series Fucking the City vol III: We love Benidorm.