Guided Tours in the Comfort of Your Own Home

Considering the issues and challenges of tourism at a time when the immobility of the pandemic has given way to a phenomenal surge in a desire to travel, when creative art residencies are increasing in rural areas so that art can reconnect with nature, and when major biennials are calling into question their historical colonialism — while knowing that the tourism industry is responsible for almost 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions: all this certainly elicits a fair share of cognitive dissonance. Yes, an important environmental awareness emerges, which leads informed travellers to engage in ecotourism or sustainable tourism. Yet are we actually witnessing a real desire to transform the tourism industry? Or is it in fact a powerful greenwashing campaign or a “worldphagy,”1 1  - “One of the paradoxes of tourism today is to kill the very thing being experienced, like a true worldphagy parasite.” Rodolphe Christin, Manuel de l’antitourisme (Montréal: Éditions Écosociété, 2017, our translation). The rise of environmentally responsible travel does not, however, erase this worldphagy. greened to justify extractivist behaviour? The recent emergence of a form of travel called “last-chance tourism,” motivated by a discovery of places doomed to disappear due to climate change, is distressing even the strongest optimists. The harshest cynics, on the other hand, see this as an additional expression of a rapidly growing egotourism.

By having to be open to the world, art is particularly affected by the global challenges of movement. At the time of publishing this issue, the art scene is being monopolized by the 60th Venice Biennale (whose theme, incidentally, is Foreigners Everywhere), an event that now has been extended by a few weeks to attract more tourists and generate more profit. For many in the art world, this is a period when the much-vaunted FOMO (fear of missing out) is most sharply felt, while photos of works, art events, and legendary places skyrocket on social media. During the Biennale, Venice becomes the hot spot of contemporary art, the place where one must go to see and be seen — like Corvo Island is for ornithologists in the fall.² 2 - See Scott Rogers’s essay in this issue. Those who don’t wish to contribute to the Venetian overtourism envision practising JOMO (joy of missing out).

One way to discover the world from the comfort of one’s balcony is to get swept up in reflections on art. In a way, this feature offers a guided tour of both obvious and less likely situations and sites where art and tourism intersect. We begin with a brief overview of the Grand Tour of Europe, which laid the foundation of art tourism, from its eighteenth-century version to its most recent iteration, which connects the Venice Biennale, documenta in Kassel, and Skulptur Projekte Münster. We then go to Les Arques (France), Hyrynsalmi (Finland), Kabeliai (Lithuania), and Fogo Island (Canada), four research-
creation destinations in which to observe the notion of the “touristicity” of places and their ecological or social regeneration policies. We discover that the initial motivation, namely to offer artists the opportunity to get away from their daily working contexts, now comes hand-in-hand with a desire to revalorize the region in which these residencies take root. To a certain degree, this offsets the asymmetrical interactions prevalent in conventional tourism, by which visitors take more than they give to the places and the locals who welcome them.

We then head to Mauritius through a video work by Caroline Déodat who observes Sega music and dance so as to examine the folkloric aspects — the fetishization of people and cultures — of the current tourism industry, placing them in parallel with the colonial history of exploitation. We then turn to the Middle East, where the European colonial venture led to the “orientalist” vision of tourism. Guided by diaspora artists, we see how they reappropriate the idea of tourism for critical, as well as compassionate and solidary purposes. The question of mobility for members of diasporas is a delicate one. Tammer El-Sheikh underscores that “the denied right of return for Palestinian refugees sits uneasily alongside international marketing campaigns that have made Israel a major tourist destination for others.” Through their work, the artists remind us that the genocide currently taking place in Palestine is not receiving adequate media coverage.

Our journey then takes us back in time, to discover the cave art in the Cosquer Cave, located in the calanques of Marseille. Although the tourist’s search for authenticity often faces sad appropriations (as with the Sega dance), the replica can be a solution for preserving cave paintings. However, here, as in other places, tourist attractions also have their dark aspects, particularly the exacerbated impoverishment caused by the mass “airbnbification” of housing in larger (and smaller) cities around the world. Not surprisingly, this situation sometimes leads to the emergence of touristophobia in the local population.

Our next stop makes us attune to the slow rhythm of Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang and enter the unhurried time of Walker. The still images that accompany the article, taken from the most recent films in the series, gently transport us to the cities of Taipei, Hong Kong, and Paris, as we follow the footsteps of a Buddhist monk. Extoling the aesthetics of locomotion and slowness, the work is not without a critical sense; the filmmaker openly demands “a stop to everything” and a decline.

We complete our tour like birds in flight by taking a critical look at ornithomania — the compulsive and excessive custom of bird lovers to travel around the world to photograph rare specimens. The perspective of Scott Rogers, himself a bird enthusiast, makes us reflect on the forms that our passion and desire to experience nature may take. Although full of good intentions, the current obsession with everything to do with ecology (the outdoors, wilderness, fauna and flora, volcanoes and glaciers, and the like), of both artists and the general public, leads to more or less happy forms of interventionism or even clearly distressing situations (such as the example of last-chance tourism mentioned above).

Even though the negative impact of mass tourism is undeniable, the current issue attempts to hold off sinking into tourismophobia by only pointing out its flaws. After all, as geographer Rémy Knafou points out: “The media success of the expression ‘mass tourism’ opportunely allows all those nostalgically yearning for a tourism reserved for the elite to excoriate the tourism of others and, therefore, hold on to solutions that don’t match the scale of the problems needing to be solved.”³ 3 - Rémy Knafou, Réinventer (vraiment) le tourisme : en finir avec les hypocrisies du tourisme durable (Paris: Éditions du Faubourg, 2023), 58 (our translation). Let us avoid this pitfall and attempt instead to seek viable solutions by thwarting tourismocracy — the excessive power exercised by the tourist system — and by showing imagination in our desire for travel. Here are some ideas: travel at a slower pace, less often, and perhaps even closer to home; on the long list of “must-see” attractions, check off “give up my spot to others”; seek out new non-places, sites without value so dear to anthropologist Marc Auger, then forget them as soon as they become appealing and “Instagrammable”; take a break from discovery; read old travelogues without seeking to reproduce them; travel in your mind. Be still.

Translated from the French by Oana Avasilichioaei