Llonovoy

FOR SALE land in the sea

Our friend Miquel Àngel some years ago turned into Miquel Àngel Llonovoy (yo no voy ~ ‘do it without me’) like a fabulous animal which suddenly develops a member of its body whose function and spectacularity could be only intuited before. Since then he has done a thousand different things, but mostly a certain kind of stage performances – let us call it theatre – of an absolutely individual and intransferable character. Before that, we had published together six issues of a home-made journal of which there remains no memory (we will write about it on another occasion). But we did much more. For example I vividly remember how we protested in a kind of a performance (this is how these acts were called in Spain in the early eighties) against port expansion works in Felanitx (Porto Colom), where at the end we were covered with not very fresh fish. And above all, we have lived through a stormy period while growing up and trying to find out what will we be when we grow up (we still do not know and perhaps will never know it), stretching the limits of imagination and play in all direction. I keep those years in my heart with all the warmth imaginable.

One of our concerns was and has remained the accelerated self-destruction of Mallorca because of the alleged demands of mass tourism and its false profits. Miquel Àngel in one of his performances cried out: “The tourists have arrived and memories began to be called souvenirs.” Recently he was the greatest animator of the movement “Cimentiments (o no m’asfaltis el respecte)” (Cemento mori, o don’t asphalt my view) which, however, could not hold back the aggressive advance of the great building companies hand in hand with the different governing parties during the past four years. Nevertheless, it was a good try.

On Midsummer Night of this June it was Miquel Àngel Llonovoy to open the feast of Palma on the Parc de la Mar. In the shadow of the Cathedral, dressed half Saint John and half Bin Laden, he kept criticizing our external and internal problems from the almost invisible ones to those as obvious as a black eye, provoked by those governing us (and surely also by our own way of living). But as a herald of the feast, he effused humor above all, and his peculiar intelligence elevated the contradictions to the very level of self-parody. He was genial. For the sake of feeling, have a look at the video below even if his Catalan peppered with local allusions and word plays is nothing more for you than an eloquent Mediterranean verbal waterfall.

“…for a devil without a fork is like a representative in the local government without corruption, like a politician without a taylor, like a meadow without golf…”

But Miquel Àngel has his fix place in our “Río Wang” also as the creator of “L’Estrany Museu Llonovoy” (Llonovoy’s Curioseum). We talked about game before. Have a look at his collection of impossible toys, manufactured from objects trouvés provided with a new life and charged with a critical sense that ranges from the naïf to the antimilitarist.