A “pluriverse” is a way of picturing reality as something other than one single, universal story — a world, as the phrase goes, where many worlds fit. It is a useful lens for a place like Mallorca, where capital and one particular idea of “development” have come to dominate the imagination of what life here can look like, crowding out the many other ways of living, valuing and relating that persist alongside it, usually unseen.
Mass tourism has not only produced economic dependency here; it has produced cultural imaginaries too. The gendered archetypes that took hold in the 1960s — historian Mary Nash has written about the “erotic Swedish woman” and the “Latin lover” as figures shaped by an orientalist, neocolonial gaze — still echo in how the island gets seen and sold today. Rising housing costs and the spread of short-term rentals are displacing the people who actually live here, which is its own kind of answer to the pluriverse’s founding question: not all worlds, it turns out, get to coexist on equal terms.
What art can do that argument can’t
Art matters here because it can hold open what a purely economic or political argument tends to close down. In a small questionnaire on art, value and creativity — asked of people who call themselves artists and people who don’t — one idea came up again and again: art’s job is to make visible what dominant ways of seeing keep hidden. It can destabilise a place’s neat, marketable image without needing to resolve every contradiction it surfaces.
That is not a comfortable position. Art is not somehow outside the systems it critiques — plenty of contemporary artistic production depends on the same extraction and global circulation it questions, and it is fair to ask whether art risks becoming just another way of aestheticising crisis rather than confronting it. Several respondents pointed to the same tension in their own lives: the pull between making work on your own terms and making a living, and how differently those feel depending on who the work is for.
Rather than simply representing reality, art can function as a lens through which dominant imaginaries are challenged and other ways of living become perceptible.
Despite that, initiatives working in a situated, relational and collective way — projects like SIT-PLU, closer to home — show that art does not only represent alternative worlds. It can prefigure them: enacting, in however small a way, different ways of living, working and relating within the limits of the systems we are actually stuck inside for now. Understanding art this way — as an in-between space, not a solution — is less about answers than about keeping the tension open long enough to imagine other configurations of living together: ones that are more just, and more plural, than the one on the postcards.
Drawing on the work of Maria Lugones, Susan Paulson and colleagues, Mary Nash, and the SIT-PLU project.