Donde nada ocurre [Where Nothing Happens] is a project that entailed salvaging the memory of abandoned or temporarily vacant nightclubs on my home island of Ibiza. The work revolves around five different locations: Idea, Festival Club, Heaven, Toro Mar and Glory’s. Each of these buildings has a specific connection to the early days of tourism on the island and its evolution over the years, and to my interest in learning how this supposed hippie paradise became the clubbing capital of the world. 

Different videos, sculptures and photographs compose an itinerary through these failed business ventures, treating nightclubs as the new temples of our age as well as the island’s biggest tourist attraction. Off-island visitors have been the main source of Ibiza’s prosperity since the 1970s, when the tourism boom did away with its traditional subsistence economy. The primary aim of this project was to study the island’s history, the impact of the tourism industry and how it appropriates the power of mythology, the nightlife culture and its architecture, and the evolution of electronic music as a response to a specific social context, in a place that lacks the resources to satisfy such a high demand, where the social fabric has deteriorated significantly and not even the hardest workers can afford halfway decent housing. The pieces play with the atmosphere of the dance club, with the idea of escape and thoughtful contemplation back when those parties had no VIP rooms.

In collaboration with the Diario de Ibiza, I published a newspaper containing articles and adverts about each of those businesses from 1969 to 2012.