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If you happen to be in Barcelona, Felix Madrazo and Supersudaca, the Dutch-Latin American think tank for architecture and urban research, proudly invite you to the opening of the exhibition SUDAPAN Endles(s)trips competition this Friday from12 noon to 8pm in the RAS gallery.

Organized by the collective Supersudaca in association with The Prince Claus Fund and with the support of IAAC (Institute of Advanzed Architecture of Catalunya), Sudapan is the first international competition about alternative ideas for mass coastal tourism in one of the fastest tourism development regions of the third world, the Riviera Maya in Mexico.

Seeking to bring the concerns of mass tourism to a wider audience, this project builds upon the Al_Caribe project that Supersudaca curated for the 2nd Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam back in 2005.

Comments by members of the jury about the competition after the jump.

SUDAPAN: ULTIMATE EXOTICNESS.
By Winy Maas

The attempt to make a thought out future for the Caribbean bay and especially this Yucatan area deserves attention: The enormous tourist developments can - after a period of flourishing- easily harm the area.
How can it learn from other tourist enterprises as Costa Iberica or Croatia?
How can it combine a certain authenticity with generic developments?
How can the local economy be supported with a global "ab-usage" of the area?
On the other hand it can explore as well on the possibilities for a new exoticism. Where holidays to far away destinations were in the past about exoticness, now this word has lost its meaning for a lot of people do to globalization, mass traveling and mass tourism.
Maybe we are spoiled...
According to French philosophers exoticness is vital to compensate our daily behavior and relativize ourselves. In that sense a re-definition of exoticness is needed:
What kind of new exoticness can be created?????

SUDAPAN 1. A postscript
By Jose Castillo

Like all good competitions this first (and certainly not the last) edition of Sudapan has raised a number of issues which far exceed the scope of the proposals themselves. We have seen in these past few weeks, remarkable architectures, plans, strategies, manifestoes and political statements. They've come in the form of rhetoric, diagrams, drawings, renders, graphs and plans. In other words and what we found fascinating in the submittals is that the multiplicity of issues present in tourism have been addressed without prejudices by the participants, suspending judgments, but also taking positions and thinking them through coherent and complex arguments.

In the discussion amongst jurors, and in the presentation of those arguments, there have been spaces for agreement and disagreement, and the range of the selected and awarded projects is evidence of the diverse aesthetic and ideological agendas and choices. The competition results also leave room for optimism in recognizing that maybe it is through the spatial and temporal practices of tourism that the social, the political, the economic, the environmental, the territorial and the formal can be reinvented. In other words, it seems that there is nothing more global, more contemporary and more relevant nowadays than tourism itself. Finally, and this is something we should thank the organizers, is that the Sudapan competition has allowed both jurors and competitors to subvert, transform, expand and even co-opt supersdaca's agenda. "Todos somos sudacas!" or "We are all sudacas" seems to be a foregone conclusion.

A bright beginning indeed...

As the invite says, works from the Sin Embargo/Con Embargo Residence is presented as well.