“It’s time to do things differently”

To reach the home of Balthazar Klarwein we drive along a steep, narrow path surrounded by pure nature on the outskirts of Fornalutx. The car brushes against every tree we pass. We turn, manoeuvre, carry on driving, until finally reaching our destination.

“Was it difficult to find?” is the first thing Balthazar asks when he sees us.

We say it was.

“Well I dread to think what you would have done if you’d had to find Son Rullán!”

Son Rullán is the house in Deià where Balthazar grew up with his parents. “It was much more difficult to access than this. I’ll tell you a story. My parents wanted me to be born in Son Rullán, but you could only reach the house by a dirt track, which you could barely get an off-road vehicle up. A few days before giving birth, my mother got scared that there might be a complication and nobody would be able to come and help her. So in the end I was born in Calle Apuntadores, in the centre of Palma.

Captivated by the beauty of this place, with the panoramic view of a village nestled in the midst of the Serra de Tramuntana, the peak of Puig de l’Ofre on the left and Puig Major right behind us, we chat as little birds chirp out tunes in a natural setting that makes you feel utterly at peace.

Balthazar grew up in Deià, “in a very cosmopolitan, friendly community. The parents would take turns cooking lunch and dinner for all the children”. His father, Mati, was a highly renowned psychedelic painter, and his mother; Laure, was also an artist. “Although my parents did instil their values in me indirectly, by taking me to museums, concerts, and to see films, they never told me what to do. I grew up very organically, and I always had their support”, Baltazhar confesses.

As a small boy he took up skateboarding, but he was scared of doing some of the crazy things his friends did, so he started recording their acrobatics using his father’s video camera. And that was how his relationship with images began.

Very early on Balthazar started working in the world of fashion “on a commercial level, for lots of clients, which prevented me from devoting myself to more personal projects, something I did start to do a while back now”.

In summer of 2019 he shot the short film Yo diablo, in Deià . “It’s my first piece with actors and dialogue. It was filmed very impulsively, in a way that was very open to experimentation. It touches on selfishness and greed; it’s a satire of my vision of society through self-criticism. I wanted to show the end of an era”, he says. The short hasn’t been premiered yet, as he is waiting for a response from several film festivals.

“I find it hard to define my work. I don’t like names of professions. I started out as an assistant cameraman, then I was an editor, a videographer, a director of photography, a technical director, and assistant director; I have been a director, an audiovisual author… I sometimes put filmmaker on my Instagram account, and then artist, but I think, how pretentious is that? Maybe I’ll remove that, I don’t know”, he reflects.

Balthazar defines himself by means of his creative expressions. “I try to reflect on patterns of myself, on who I can be; I explore facets of my person through creativity”.

In his works, he reveals his concerns: “how we relate with each other as a society, as people, as individuals, how to see the world in an increasingly positive way, discover new facets of what it means to be alive, of entering into dialogue with reality, of what the conscience is”...

“Right now, we are in a crisis of reality,” he says, “although not everyone is aware of it. Society has [...]

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