Aftersun

"Aftersun is a small sample of Pol Viladoms' obsession with abandoned architectures and models of construction and urban planning linked to tourist exploitation. Among them, water parks stand out, to which he has devoted three lustrums of travel, research and exploration. This search has led the author to travel ever greater distances: from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic and from there to the Sea of Crete, to the coasts of Japan and California, visiting more than 50 locations.

Linked to sun and beach tourism, water parks began to populate our coastline during the eighties and nineties, offering new sources of hyperbolic fun close to the sea. They emerged as an extension, an orthopaedic addition to nature itself, designed to suit a type of tourist consumption that is nothing less than an extractive form of a territory that turns the landscape into another product, consumable and disposable. The lack of planning and analysis led to overconstruction and the subsequent closure and premature abandonment of many of these parks, caused, in part, by competition and by the shift towards more sustainable and ‘authentic’ tourist consumption’.
 
The photographs are accompanied by fragments of images taken from postcards (of the water parks themselves) collected over the last few years. Through their shapes, colours and motifs, these compositions establish a new temporal dialogue with the author's own work and nostalgically bring these spaces back to life, at the same time taking us back to our childhood memories [ ] that fleeting moment of happiness and shared play, turned into a propaganda appeal for the next visitor".

Extract from the text by Beatriz Escudero, included in the book.