The Practice Tour: pictures

It is already past midnight and I have just finished the rewrites of the tour script. It has been a very long and useful day. All the material is there, it has just been a matter of finding the right way to introduce it and to learn and remember it all. Tomorrow the first tour starts at 11AM so I'm not going to write more just now but will instead just leave some images of the practice runs Andreas and I made earlier and get some sleep.

A working day

I'll be brief with this report as it is late and it's been a long day of work. A first version of the text was more or less finished yesterday so I was learning it today and of course making some edits to it here and there. It's rather a lot to remember but because I am familiar with the material it shouldn't be too hard to do. For Andreas, who will be performing it in German, it is a greater challenge. 

So the weather was great today, clear blue skies and sun. The observatory deck of the station tower was finally opened so I went up and had a look at the giant revolving logo that sits so prominently. Looking around from up there was pleasant in a way but I was also happy that I chose not to use that space in my tour. What I provide is very much a street view that gives a quite different perspective, one that does not already charm the eye in a touristic way but instead is familiar and needs some work in order for it to be it transformed into anything.

Kaspar from Arttours and I went to a Stuttgart radio station today and did a rather long interview for a program in the afternoon. There was no shortage of things to talk about, indeed there were quite a number of subjects I thought we could talk about but which we never got round to covering. No problem, there's always the blog for them! But not now. Still, I must get round to talking about the relationship of art to tourism, about these frames that surround the work and also about how the idea came in the first place. Another time.

Later today I made a walk through with Andreas and we completed the tour in both English and German. After that the city was given over to football, people glued to screens, beer in hand, cheering on Dortmund as they took apart Madrid. The popularity of football reminds me a lot of the England, the only difference is they seem to win more often here. Final day of preparations tomorrow, I should get some rest soon, it will be a long long day and I keep getting woken up early here by the church bells which start around 6 AM. Noise pollution if you ask me, but then again my room is next to the bell tower so all new occupants are likely to say that.

Upright Citizens... and me

I came across a couple of funny fellows today. I got a picture of one of them. 

He was walking around the city tearing down posters and stickers. Here he was pulling down an advertisment for a nightclub stuck to a phone box. He didn't look like a cleaner or an official whose job was in any way connected to this activity. It was as if he took moral exception to these posters and made it his job to clean up the public space. I saw him move onto another phone box and perform the same action. While I cannot exactly fault him it is not the sort of behaviour that I am accustomed to seeing in the UK with the possible exception of Christians who sometimes clear tear down the prostitutes cards from the telephone boxes in London. 

The other man I came across was on Schloss Platz. I was walking along and noticed that a large screen had just been erected in the centre of the square to show films during the animation festival. As I was looking in that direction a man was walking towards me in the opposite direction and, as he came within a few meters of me, he clapped his hands together loudly to draw my attention to him. The signal was, I believe, "Hey you! Look where you are going!" Again this is behaviour I am not used to. For starters I wouldn't have walked into him so it was unnecessary but more than that he could have easily stepped aside a little if he was concerned about walking into me. Instead he saw it as his moral right to reprimand me for not being more attentive in public space. This incident reminds me of a story a friend of mine told me. He was in Bremmen recently and went into a public sauna. When some people in the sauna started saying something to one another another man raised his voice to reprimand them "No talking!"  

I've been going around my route and stopping in each location to do some detailed observation. I know more or less what I want to say about McDonalds, for example, but it really helps to spend time in each place looking for details that I can point out. To turn an everyday location, practically crushing in its banality, into the scene of a story, that is what I've been trying to do. And with some success too, I believe. This scene has become the location to talk about tourism and gastronomy and to create a  potential meeting between the gay bar on the top level and Chinese tourists eating next door to the left.  

The same sort of thing here. Checking sight lines so that there is a point in the square which is observable from the closed TV tower. The anti-S21 protesters from the station come here every Monday so they will have to be placed in this frame too. The structure has started to become quite playful in this way. I even managed to find a way to include a trip to Stuttgart's Fruhlingsfest by the football supporter's  from Aldershot Town and turn that into a little story.

The Day Without a Tour

Today I've been very conscious of the tight schedule that I now have to work around.There is a very definite clock ticking and several things that still remain to be done.

This was the view of the sky just now. Profoundly grey. It's been like this all day which I should welcome I guess as it has provided me with every reason I need to stay indoors in front of the computer writing the text that I and Andy will give.  

Here's another view. The text has really come on leaps and bounds and I now have some pleasure in it. Rather than just doing the job and delivering the message it starts to accumulate layers. Previously I would arrive at a location and have something to say about the place and the tour that it forms a part of. Now however it is a little more complicated with tours accumulating and commenting upon one another in locations. I could work in this way for a good while yet but will have to distill this more into a system that  can be improvised around rather than anything more ambitious.

The furthest I managed to get out of the apartment today was a a 20 minute walk around the block in order to buy bretzels. I still cannot decide if I even like them but feel a vague obligation upon myself to try to since they are speciality of the region. That, I think, is touristic behaviour.

We've been working out the finer details of the timing of the tours, the languages and bookings. A radio interview has been arranged and the publicity machine is gearing up. It will certainly be quite a shock to suddenly have people in front of me with whom I have to share these musings. So far the project has mostly been conducted by me, walking alone through the streets of the city and into a few institutions for the occasional tour. when it becomes a social event I suspect there will have to be some adjustment. That will all come soon enough, first tour is Friday morning and then we'll be on a morning and afternoon schedule till Sunday. If you want to book do get in touch with Arttours.