Gazes and Dialogues. From 19 to 23 August 2026, Ses Escolàpies in Sóller becomes a meeting place for photography, painting and contemporary ways of looking at Mallorca — through the eyes of artists and people who live within its landscape.
A week ago, thousands of people in Mallorca looked at the same sky.
For a few extraordinary moments, the light changed.
The mountains surrounding Sóller darkened. Familiar colours shifted. People stopped what they were doing and looked upward.
Then the light returned.
But what happens to our gaze after an experience like that?
From 19 to 23 August 2026, Gazes and Dialogues — Mirades i Diàlegs takes this question back down to earth.
Inside the historic Capella de Ses Escolàpies, photography, painting and other artistic languages come together to explore how people see the place they inhabit: its landscapes, its bodies, its memories and its transformations.
This is not an exhibition about the eclipse.
It happens after the eclipse.
And that difference matters.
Because once the spectacle is over, the landscape remains.
And we return to looking.
What Does It Mean to Look at Sóller?
Sóller is one of the most photographed landscapes in Mallorca.
Visitors photograph the tram crossing Plaça de la Constitució, the façades of its historic centre, the orange groves, the Port, the mountains of the Serra de Tramuntana and the particular Mediterranean light that changes throughout the day.
But there is another Sóller.
The Sóller seen from inside.
A place experienced not as scenery, but through repetition, memory, relationships and everyday life.
A street walked hundreds of times.
A mountain seen from the kitchen window.
A face that belongs to a personal history.
An olive tree whose shape has changed slowly over decades.
The difference between seeing a place and living within it lies at the heart of Gazes and Dialogues.
The exhibition brings together different artistic perspectives and asks a deceptively simple question:
What do we really see when we look at the place where we live?
Pere Colom: The Human Body as Landscape
Photography has been central to the work of Pere Colom for decades.
Based in Mallorca, Colom has developed a body of fine-art photography that moves between portraiture, mythology, the human body and Mediterranean landscape. His own presentation of his work describes a search for traces of stories, emotions and myths within faces, bodies and the ancient landscapes of Mallorca.
That relationship between person and territory is particularly relevant here.
In Colom’s work, the body is not necessarily separated from landscape.
Skin, gesture, age, expression and memory can themselves become forms of geography.
A portrait may contain a history.
A body may carry time.
A face may reveal something about the place in which a life has unfolded.
His trajectory has also moved between commercial and artistic photography. Colom recalls that a major feature in the international photography magazine PHOTO in 1985 led him to establish his own photographic studio and take photography fully into his professional life.
Decades later, his gaze remains strongly connected to Mallorca.
Not Mallorca as postcard.
Mallorca as lived territory.
Sunna Wathen: Painting a Landscape from Within
The work of Sunna Wathen approaches landscape through another language.
Wathen is an abstract artist whose practice extends across painting, sculpture and mixed media. Her current work experiments with oil, watercolour, acrylic, gouache and collage, particularly through landscape and still life.
Her relationship with Mallorca is not simply that of an artist arriving in search of a subject.
It is a long relationship with place.
That distinction changes the gaze.
When a landscape has accompanied much of your life, it stops behaving like an image.
You know its rhythms.
You recognise the colour of the rock before rain.
You know that the sea is never exactly the same blue.
You understand that summer light can be beautiful and brutal at the same time.
In Wathen’s work, landscape becomes less a representation of a location than an emotional and material experience of it.
Layers, colour and abstraction allow the territory to move away from literal description.
What remains is atmosphere.
Memory.
A sensation of place.
Two Languages, One Territory
Photography and painting appear to operate differently.
Photography begins with light reaching a surface.
Painting begins with a gesture.
One is often associated with recording reality; the other with interpreting it.
But Gazes and Dialogues complicates that distinction.
Every photographer chooses where to stand.
Every photograph excludes most of the world outside its frame.
Every painter begins from something perceived, remembered or imagined.
Both practices are ways of selecting reality.
Both are forms of attention.
And both ultimately reveal something about the person who is looking.
This is where the title becomes important.
Gazes.
Plural.
There is no single authoritative image of Sóller.
There are only different positions from which Sóller can be seen.
And when those perspectives occupy the same space, something else becomes possible:
dialogue.
Human Landscapes
We often speak about Mallorca as a landscape.
Mountains.
Sea.
Olive trees.
Stone walls.
Citrus orchards.
But landscapes are also human.
Sóller’s valley has been shaped for centuries by the interaction between geography and the people inhabiting it.
Its terraces were built.
Water was channelled.
Orange trees were planted.
Houses were constructed from local stone.
Trade connected the valley with France and other Mediterranean ports.
Factories appeared.
Tourism arrived.
New residents came.
Others left.
Today, digital technology adds another layer to that continuing transformation.
The history of Sóller can therefore be read not simply through architecture or nature, but through successive ways of inhabiting and interpreting the same territory.
In an earlier Sóller Citrus Route article, we described this evolution through four major transformations: oranges, textiles, tourism and technology.
Gazes and Dialogues belongs to that same story.
Because technology has not only changed the economy.
It has changed the gaze.
From the Photographic Negative to the Infinite Image
There was a time when making a photograph required waiting.
Film had limits.
Every frame mattered.
The image remained invisible until development.
There was uncertainty between the moment of taking the photograph and the moment of seeing it.
Today, the image appears immediately.
We photograph the sunset and look at the screen before looking again at the sunset.
We produce thousands of images.
We edit them.
Duplicate them.
Share them.
Forget them.
Sóller itself now circulates globally through millions of screens.
The same valley that was once connected to Europe through citrus exports is today exported continuously through images.
This creates another question beneath the exhibition:
Has technology changed what we look at, or has it changed how we know what is worth looking at?
The earlier Mirades i Diàlegs programme already placed analogue and digital photography in conversation and explored how immediacy, reproduction, archives and screens alter our relationship with images.
Here, that technological conversation becomes part of something wider: a reflection on attention itself.
A Post-Eclipse Landscape
On 12 August 2026, the total solar eclipse temporarily transformed the light over Sóller and Mallorca. Sóller Citrus Route had been documenting the eclipse not simply as an astronomical event, but as something experienced through landscape, place and local culture.
By 19 August, the spectacle is already behind us.
And perhaps that is exactly why this exhibition belongs here.
There is something interesting about the week after an extraordinary event.
People leave.
The cameras disappear.
The streets return to their normal rhythms.
The sun becomes ordinary again.
But the territory has been seen intensely.
For a moment, attention was concentrated on light itself.
Gazes and Dialogues continues from there.
Not by trying to recreate the eclipse, but by redirecting that attention.
From sky to ground.
From spectacle to everyday life.
From celestial landscape to human landscape.
Ses Escolàpies: A Space That Also Looks Back
The Capella de Ses Escolàpies gives the exhibition another dimension.
Located close to the centre of Sóller, its elongated interior, wooden galleries, architectural details and changing natural light make it more than a neutral exhibition room. The space itself alters how photographs, projections, movement and artworks are perceived.
During these days, Ses Escolàpies becomes a temporary meeting point.
Between historic architecture and contemporary images.
Between residents and visitors.
Between analogue and digital processes.
Between people who were born here and those who arrived and made Mallorca part of their lives.
Between different generations.
Between different ways of seeing.
The chapel does not simply contain the dialogue.
It participates in it.
Mallorca Beyond the Postcard
One of the ambitions behind Sóller Citrus Route has always been to move beyond the idea of Mallorca as a collection of beautiful views.
Beauty matters.
But a cultural landscape becomes interesting when we begin to understand why it looks the way it does.
Who shaped it?
Who remembers it differently?
Who is transforming it now?
Our previous work on Mallorca’s cultural landscape has approached Sóller as a territory in which heritage, landscape and contemporary life coexist rather than belonging to separate worlds.
Gazes and Dialogues continues that perspective through art.
Pere Colom does not see exactly what Sunna Wathen sees.
A photographer does not necessarily notice what a painter notices.
A visitor does not see exactly what someone who has lived here for forty years sees.
And someone born in Sóller may discover their own town differently through the eyes of another person.
That is precisely the value of putting these perspectives together.
There Is No Final Image of Sóller
Perhaps places remain alive because they can never be completely described.
Every generation looks again.
Every person selects another fragment.
Every artist creates another interpretation.
The territory stays roughly where it is, while the gaze changes.
In the intense light of late August, only days after the eclipse briefly transformed the island’s perception of daylight, Gazes and Dialogues invites us to do something increasingly unusual:
to spend time looking.
- Not scrolling.
- Not collecting images.
- Not searching for the definitive photograph.
Simply looking.
- At a face.
- At a painting.
- At a photograph.
- At a wall.
- At another person looking.
- And eventually, perhaps, at Sóller itself.
Because there is no single image of this valley.
There are gazes.
And between them, if we are willing to pay attention, there can be dialogues.
Gazes and Dialogues — Mirades i Diàlegs
19–23 August 2026
Capella de Ses Escolàpies
Google maps https://www.google.com/maps?q=39.76687,2.717423
Carrer del Bisbe Mateu Colom
Sóller, Mallorca
Photography · Painting · Image · Movement · Sound
A contemporary encounter with Mallorca’s human and territorial landscapes, seen through the people who inhabit them.
Explore Sóller beyond the postcard.
Explore the landscape through another gaze and dialogues.
Pere Colom: https://www.perecolom.art
Sunna Wathen: Instagram
More about Sóller: https://www.sollercitrusroute.com/soller-orange-valley-guide-2026/
Local Makers: https://ciutatdesoller.org/market.html