Islander Out

Photo essay on the contemporary impossibility of protecting the home. It begins with my grandmother, who sustained the house and family bonds, and confronts gentrification and real estate speculation that have made the home impossible to keep safe.

Rooted in my family home in Mallorca, the project departs from an intimate loss to address a broader structural condition affecting the Balearic Islands and the northern Mediterranean, where housing and territory are increasingly treated as financial assets rather than places to live. After my grandparents’ deaths, the house entered a process of vulnerability shaped by constant pressure to sell, demolition threats, and speculative urban transformation.

Islander Out is an ongoing project that I approach as a form of contemporary archaeological research-driven experimentation. The project is currently in a phase of production, focused on the construction of a photobook.

The photobook is conceived as a double-sided structure with no fixed beginning or end. One side unfolds from inside the house, centered on my grandmother as matriarch and symbolic guardian of domestic life, memory, and identity. When she dies, the emotional structure of the home collapses. The other side moves outward to the neighborhood, tracing more than seventy years of urban transformation driven by speculative planning and real estate pressure.

Both narrative threads converge at the center of the book through real estate flyers collected from the house’s mailbox, material evidence of the silent violence that haunts the neighborhood.

Through this structure, Islander Out is driven by the attempt to respond to two intertwined questions: why can’t we keep our homes safe, and why haven’t I been able to keep this house safe?

Part of this project has been developed for exhibition at Cortona On The Move 2025, with the support of the Institut d’Estudis Baleàrics.