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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Balamane: Variations on a Noisy Ground

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This contribution concentrates on a discussion of four conceptual keywords – Helmut, Sunglasses, Water, Language – which we explore as semiotic variations on a ground. This approach to the contradictory everyday realities of the touristic setting in Mallorca is the result of our (self-)critical reflections on how to write about language, migration, encounters, the normal and the liminal in the party tourism spot – and on how to give a (personal) insight into the world of contradictions at the Ballermann. We are considerably grateful to our research colleagues Angelika Mietzner and Janine Traber, with whom we have been working on the complex entanglements of tourism and migration since 2016 in a DFG-funded research project. With “ground” we aim to designate something similar to the Baroque ground, a brief recurring melodic pattern in the bass part of a composition that serves as its principal structural element. At the Ballermann, a site of mass tourism and a party trip destination located on the Spanish island of Mallorca, this recurring melodic pattern is mostly perceived as noise – noise that permeates spaces, bodies and speech alike. Yet, the noisy is not void of meaning; rather, sense is made in complex, messy and twisted ways, by emphasizing the possibility that nothing ever is as what it seems. By turning the gaze to those who live in the noisiness of the Ballermann as migrants, namely people from West Africa who participate in Mallorca’s tourism industry under precarious work conditions, we look at contradictory experiences and expressivities that appear to be essential to the ways in which we can exist in the non-place.