The Pérez Siquier Center in Almería presents the exhibition 'Proper Places' by Mar Sáez (Murcia, 1983), curated by Sema D'Acosta, a project carried out between 2018 and 2022 in Lo Pagán, a coastal town on the Mar Menor where he spent his childhood and adolescence. Since she was little, every summer she was surprised to find people who came to try her waters and healing muds to relieve pain, osteoarthritis and skin problems. Over time, that idyllic landscape of her memory has become a sick place due to excess pollution and rampant tourism, an extreme situation that in the last decade has caused an ecological and social crisis. This work is a return to childhood based on the bitter adult awareness of the decline of the Mar Menor. A return to the territory where she grew up to observe its deterioration with a certain nostalgia, missing a past that will no longer return but that now serves to reflect from her own biography on the abandonment that the Mediterranean coast has suffered.
“I was born in the eighties in a coastal town in the Region of Murcia called Lo Pagán,” says the photographer. “My childhood and adolescence were spent among baths and mud in the Mar Menor.”
“I remember,” she says, “diving surrounded by fish, cockles and some seahorses. “Every summer was a ritual.” He also visualizes his municipality “as a pole of attraction for tourists, I was always surprised that they had come to this precise point on the map, with joint diseases or looking for the therapeutic power that our curious 'natural pool' of volcanic origin and high concentration of salt promised.” ».
We are talking about a natural treasure that, over the years, the artist laments, “has deteriorated. A sea sick from excess pollution and uncontrolled urban planning. “A sea with clear signs of decline as a result of excess nutrients in the water (eutrophication) that have caused an inevitable ecological and social crisis in this territory.”
Nostalgia
'Places of my own' is “a return to the memory of my childhood from the bitter adult awareness of the decline of the Mar Menor. A return to the territory where I grew up to observe its wound, looking into the nostalgic eyes of vacationers who long to embrace the warm customs of the past, surrounded by a living landscape that fades into their memory. “Visitors – less and less – and locals continue to apply this sludge, although now in a different way,” he adds. “These people put these 'muds' on their bodies,” she says, “with concern and distrust. The contamination they observe baffles them and raises doubts about the conservation of its therapeutic properties or its possible harmful effects.
Fortunately, he tells visitors, “the future of the Mar Menor seems more hopeful now. Thanks to a Popular Legislative Initiative (ILP), the Senate approved a new law in 2022 that turns the lagoon into the first ecosystem in Europe with its own legal personality.
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