The Beijing Tour of All Tours: Video Documentation

 

There is not a great deal of video documentation of The Tour of All Tours: you had to be there to see it, basically. But, over time, some bits and pieces do come together and this is one of those. This video was made for the exhibition On Holiday (CEAC Xiamen 2022) which took critical tourism and performance as its basis. The Beijing tour was reconstructed as a video for the exhibition and here, now, is that video. 

One of the things that is quite obvious is the gap between text and image. This is the result of filming the tour five years after it was made. Five years is a long time in Beijing and many changes had taken place. This gap is not so much a problem as another layer and point of interest, as far as I see it.

One of the biggest changes is that the organization that commissioned and hosted the tour, Bookworm, had left Sanlitun. There was, therefore, an element of nostalgia for the recent past.  

 

An Aquatic Themed Tour of Reclamation Street, Hong Kong

 

Reclamation Street on the Kowloon Peninsula is built on land extended into the sea and runs about one mile north to south. This performance involved walking from the southern end of the street to the northern end of it obeying one basic rule. This rule was to stop in every shop that sold water, to buy a bottle and to then empty it over yourself. I did this and very wet I quickly became, I was wet to the skin as I popped into small stores in search of yet more water. The plastic bottles were collected and deposited at the recycling centre at the northern end of the street.