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Tourism, Language and Migration in Mallorca

Researcher: Prof. Dr. Anne Storch, Prof. Dr. Nico Nassenstein (Mainz), PD Dr. Angelika Mietzner, Janine Traber, Fatou Cisse Kane

© Anne Storch

The beach as a mass tourism site provides consumable liminalities. At El Arenal on the island of Mallorca, the beach combines various such commodified forms of liminality, which, probably most saliently, are constructed as various forms of southernness and precarity, but also as transformative and privileging.

The beach at El Arenal in which this project is interested, is hardly ever referred to by its official name, but as Ballermann, a word originally created as the name of a bar in Germany. Yet this stretch of sand and the streets next to it are excessively globalized, in the sense that voices from multiple parts of the world – German, Senegalese, Brazilian, Nigerian, Argentinian, Spanish, Chinese – talk, shout, sing, play and flatter, creating (surrounded by sounds from the bars and music halls) an ambience of noisiness, whereby noise is one feature associated with the liminality offered by a kind of El Arenal and the space where encounters take place.

The project team investigate communicative practices surrounding intimacy, trash, food, noise, bodies, t-shirts, cliffs, sex, borders and the beach.