My Kingdom

My Kingdom by Catalan photographer Txema Salvans offers a sharp-witted insight into contemporary Spanish society, and a wry comment on the climate of power in the artist’s home country. Salvans splices together blackand-white photographs of ordinary citizens enjoying the Mediterranean coast, with citations from the political rhetoric of former King of Spain, Juan Carlos I (1975–2015). Drenched in authority and affect, his speech conveys a King playing the role of a good-natured sovereign, the tender ruler of a democratic monarchy. In Salvans’ subversive combination of image and text, the language acts like a socio-political filter, through which the gestures and emotions of the beach-goers are seen – the hopes, the indolence, and the aggression of people parading their own small sovereignties: the freedom to nap, eat, sunbathe, play, love and suffer, and display their human uniqueness. Power, as something embodied and enacted, permeates the king’s speech and the interactions of ordinar