These photographs are mainly of roadwork signs that display graffiti of swastikas and Stars of David, signifiers that are loaded with symbolical weight. The country lane, on which the street signs have been photographed, is being widened. In Mallorca, where much of the rural landscape is being cultivated as a building site for largely German purchasers, feelings run high among the natural inhabitants. Mallorca is still recovering from the repressions of a fascist dictatorship that ended only a quarter of a century ago; under Franco even the Catalan language was forbidden. Now the Mallorquin people are trying to cope with a tourist industry that has taken on colonial proportions. Although the trade guarantees incoming wealth, the foreign interest is for the Balearic location, not for the culture. Given this context, the meaning of the graffiti becomes complicated and less easy to encode.

Tanya Ury