Salou, Dream City 
Adrià Goula
From 21 September to 28 October CC Pati Llimona
salou, Dream City – Adrià Goula
Exhibition from 21 September to 28 October
CC Pati Llimona, Carrer Regomir 3, Barcelona
Tel. 932566100 ccpatillimona@patillimona.net
When you walk through Salou you can go from Jamaica to Havana just by changing pavements. And without realising it, you can cross from Florida, in Bello Horizonte to Chamonix in just two minutes. Suddenly, you can find yourself between Maracaibo and Caracas, or you can find yourself surrounded by Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza, Corsica and Sardinia, seeing them all at the same time. You can also end up in places we thought lost, such as Atlantis or Dorado. Whether out of a desire to emulate the desired summer resorts or to feel as close as possible to a dream paradise, many flat blocks in Salou and other coastal towns such as Cambrils or Calafell are named after other tourist destinations in the world: Cancun, California, Antibes, Bahia, Hawaii… Between a denial of reality itself and the construction of a dream, different earthly paradises follow one another in an implausible cartography.
This project uses different techniques such as photography, collage, installation, video and drawing to contrast the reality of 1960s holiday buildings on the Catalan coast with the illusion of the perfect holiday. The everyday life of a village is confronted with the idealised image offered by the names of exotic destinations. But at the same time, the naming generates a hyperreality that allows us to reinterpret the city through this simulated world. A mythification of certain tourist destinations created through the incipient mass media of the sixties, to end up making, as Baudrillard says, the sign (literally) take the place of reality. Greek islands, mountains in the Alps, beaches in South America, all of them one after the other, proudly advertised with a sign that generates this simulacrum.
Adrià Goula Sardà is an architect (ETSAB, 2000) and since 2004 he has combined architectural photography with more personal work of a more multidisciplinary nature. His work is based on photography, which he uses as a starting point, as an outline of certain themes of interest that are later developed and expanded with other works in different formats, such as installation, sculpture, drawing and video. These themes revolve around the relationship between human construction and its place in the world, between artificiality, nature, memory and its traces.
Among other projects and exhibitions, it is worth mentioning his work “Re-Edificatoria” on buildings under renovation, which was part of the Spanish Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale, awarded the Lleó d’Or and received the “Bienalba Award for Photographic Production in Architecture” at the 2017 Buenos Aires Biennial of Architecture. In 2020 he received the Silver and Bronze Lux in the category of Architecture and Interior Design Photography and was awarded a prize at the Spanish Architecture and Urbanism Biennial 2021 in the photography section. The multidisciplinary project “Cel-la Nòmada”, which is based on a research on the cell of the Model prison in Barcelona where his father was imprisoned during the dictatorship, has participated in the collective exhibitions at the Felicia Fuster Foundation (Oct. 2020) and at Lab36 of Galeria Senda (June 2020), at MAC (Mataró Art Contemporani, Feb/March 22), and has had a monographic exhibition at Galeria H2o (2021). It has also evolved into new proposals shown at the Festival Lluernia (Nov 22), the festival La Bianyal (Oct 22) and an exhibition at Cal Xerta in St. Pere de Riudebilltes (Jul 22).
