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CONCRETA TEXTS

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The Concreta Texts series brings together publications specialising in three areas of strength and research: art and tourism, anthropology and image, curating and care.

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Souvenir, Souvenir. An Anthropologist Before Tourism

Fernando Estévez González (La Orotava, 1953- 2016) was always an atypical anthropologist. His research focused mainly on debunking colonial and ideological prejudices of his own discipline, or criticising the role the social sciences had in the construction of the narrative of Canarian identity. His book...

04/07/2024

The Virtual Tourist. Image as Destination

The desire to travel and to see other places, inherent to human beings, has always meant more than a matter of mere survival. Our ability to venture ourselves, varying our position in the world, is a way of adopting another point of view and broadening...

04/07/2024

Wild Encounters: Art, Consumption and Cannibal Tourism

"Cannibals have always been others. This is a common and widespread prejudice throughout the world. It is a way of attributing to the stranger the negative mark of an extreme otherness that allows us to delimit the borders of our own identity. The term cannibal It was born linked to the conquest of America, the cultural confrontation, the imperial war and plunder. For centuries, Europe used it as an instrument of legitimization of imperialism and colonialism. However, during the last decades of the last century, with global tourism. and the devaluation of the exotic, we witness the displacement of the figure of the cannibal from the edges of our world towards the center, from our external space to our internal space. José Díaz Cuyás

08/02/2022

The great experience. The commune of Otto Muehl in La Gomera

"The Viennese Actionist artist, Otto Muehl, founded a commune in 1970 with the intention of fusing art and life. The project had an exceptional development, it had more than five hundred members, becoming one of the largest countercultural communities in Europe. of the 20th century. At the beginning of the 1980s, the group lightened its social-revolutionary ideology and went from an economy based on rural collectivism to turning to financial speculation investments. The discipline of scheduled work ended up putting high profitability in contradiction. the hedonistic and collectivist principles that had been the foundation of the commune". Ralph Kistler

08/02/2018

Human Zoos, Ethnic Freaks and Ethnological Exhibitions

"A decade ago, while I was carrying out doctoral research in Paris on the relationships between photography and anthropology, I had the opportunity to learn about a phenomenon that from the first moment caught my attention: what some specialists had called human zoos. The general formula, According to the model of the exhibitions organized by the promoter Carl Hagenbeck in the Jardin d'Acclimatation in Paris in the second half of the 19th century, it was apparently simple. If we take a human group belonging to an exotic society, we bring it to Europe—voluntarily or by force. force—and we place it in a fenced enclosure recreating the natural environment in which it lives as is done in wild animal zoos, we will be able to see first-hand its appearance and habits without leaving the warmth of home or endangering our lives." . Hasan G. López Sanz

08/02/2017