Tours Coming Up: a tour crazy June

There are some tour events coming up that I'd like to mention. 

First of all, the London Tour is proving enduringly popular so it will return again on Thursday 11th June, starting at 7 PM from outside of Richmix London E1 6LA. 

Reservations: info ( a t ) billaitchison.co.uk Cost £8

The following day, June 12th, I'll be participating in Bees in a Tin in Birmingham, giving a talk on alternative tours. This will also include a discussion and it is part of a larger day featuring a number of invited speakers who cover topics across the arts, science and technology.

Then, on 19th and 20th June I will be participating in the Performing Place 3 Symposium at the University of Chichester giving a presentation on The Tour of All Tours.

To finish off a tour rich June I will be presenting a new tour of tours in Berlin for B-Tour Festival in Berlin 26th and 27th June. The festival is devoted to artist-made tours of alternative varieties and is a quite ideal context to see the project in. If you are anywhere nearby, make a point of coming and see some of the other tours too; this is where it is happening!

July is set to be busy too with the premiere of a new tour performance in Amsterdam and in August it will be Edinburgh's turn. Hope to see you in one of these places.

  

Artists as Tourists

I write this entry in an inbetween state: I am home and have unpacked my bags from last weekend's symposium at NIDA and am getting ready to pack for the next journey. I will indeed most probably meet some of the same faces next week: when we went our separate ways there were many of us who said Venice Biennale would be the next stop on the merry go round. Can we then talk about artists as tourists, and if so where can this lead us?

At the symposium "Critical tourism, site-specificity and post-romantic condition" there was a low-level but pervading negative tone about tourists. They were often equated with the most superficial form of travel, a form of thrill seeking that has little use for serious art. Art seemed to be considered a more fitting place for considering relationships to site, for constructing a critical discourse that went beyond beaches, bars and barbecues. There were exceptions such as Error Collective who were designing immersive art installations cum artist lifestyle breaks and there were also those who, perhaps wisely, steered away from the subject of tourists all together. 

I have the feeling that this malaise over travel and tourism is something of a luxury problem. The majority of people taking holidays do not have the opportunity to travel internationally so often and for them they might not experience the mechanics of travel in so negative a way. I also have the feeling that the hunger for authenticity is not a constant. An artist or researcher might well make the elaboration of meaning an objective of theirs when in a place. I believe, however, meaning comes in many forms and is something of a speciality taste of its own. We as artists might do a residency and succeed in understanding the light in a place or appreciate layers of history or language or whatever is the focus of our work but that does not necessarily stop us from acting like tourists in many other regards. Regular tourists are also liable to have 'real' experiences by which I mean ones which have not been designed for the exclusive benefit of visitors. They may choose to avoid these or embrace them, enjoy them or be wary of them, but they will surely happen in any environment except perhaps a totalising tourist location like a Disney theme park, though even here reality has a nasty habit of reasserting itself.   

For me then, I think that it is good to view artists as being more similar than different to tourists and to use this as a starting point for offering something that constructively and artistically engages with tourism. I understand that this position brings with it some very particular artistic challenges and these will not suit every form of work or even every project of mine. What does excite me however is the realisation that tourists are in a rather special inbetween state of their own. They are often actively seeking distraction and an out of the ordinary experience. The tourist can be encouraged to find this in a bewildering range of possibilities; we heard about Thanotourism, tourists attracted to death and disaster, to graves and battlefields; we also heard of communist nostalgia tourism and slum tourism. The tourist really is malleable. Why not then view the artist as the 'expert tourist', as someone who can construct situations and experiences that connect people from different places? This is not quite the same idea as cultural tourism, though I suspect they crossover in certain regards, but is instead an artistic response to the condition of tourism. Something that might be a goal worth pursuing is to not only see artists as tourists but to also see tourists as artists. This is somewhat ambitious and may work more as an idea than a reality but if it is an idea that leads us somewhere interesting, if it provokes another form of travel, it is one I am willing to ride with.

The Critical Tourist's Tour: an artist led tour on the Curonian Spit

This weekend I was at Nida Artist's Colony in Lithuania for the symposium Critical Tourism, Site-specificity and Post-romantic Condition. I'll get onto the presentations separately and focus on the tour I took first. This was offered as a part of the symposium which combined artist's presentations, conference papers, talks, events, performances and meals all themed around Critical Tourism. It was a great chance to meet other people from many places busy with related ideas and projects to mine.  

The tour began on the sand dunes of the Curonian Spit (awkward name I know!), the natural feature that this area is famous for. Although it began in bright sunshine the weather changed quickly and a heavy shower drenched the tour group while we were listening to our guides talking about The Maldives. After 5 minutes of shivering I bolted and took shelter under a tree, loosing contact with the group.

I then took my own tour through the forest which we had been told earlier had been planted to prevent the sand dunes from engulfing the settlements as had happened previously, back in the 18th Century. After having a good look around and drying off it was time to find the group and see how the tour was progressing. This offered the fun task of tracking. Through the sand this was not too difficult as a group of 15 leaves quite a footprint. They did however also pass over grass so some guesswork was also needed. Since the theme of the tour was the swallowing of The Maldives into the Ocean I figured they'd pass down to the water and I was right: their trail reappeared, I caught up with them and picked up the story.

I think  this interruption actually added to the experience rather than interfered with it as it offered time to actively engage with the landscape alone scanning the sand like a hound hot on the trail. This is a point that resonates with the work I was doing in Zagreb recently where we were talking a lot about the amount of space we should leave people in order for them to engage with the surroundings. If you hold their hand and guide them too tightly then they are likely to experience the location less and your guiding more.

We came to a swamp. The weather was wonderfully hot, somewhere in the high 20s, and this was a very special landscape with pools of standing water on either side of us. It had a threatening beauty uniquely its own: claustrophobic, sticky, uncertain and teaming with life, we entered what was probably the most heavily mosquito infested area I have ever had the pleasure to pass through.   

This is how we began our careful trudge through the swamp. Already arms are beginning to flick away our tormentors. After another minute of this it became clear that we were being welcomed en mass as our little friend's dinner feast. Buttons were done up to cover us as best we could and arms flapped ever more vigorously as were being eaten alive. The careful walking pace speeded up to a steady march and by the end finished with a jog, a rapid escape was in order. As someone who seems to be particularly tasty to biting insects I think I got more than my fair share of bites my legs a red on white Dalmatian Coastine.

We finally emerged from the swamp and the tour concluded with a final reading in which we learnt about the problems facing some artists from the Maldives and underwater cabinet meeting staged by the island's president to draw attention to the impending disappearance of the country.

With the tour now over we went to the beach that stretched out beside us and made our way to the nearby Russian border. It is here that the critical tourists stripped down to their swimming costumes and one after another ran into the still chilly waters of the Baltic to exclaim how great it was and then promptly run back out shivering and squealing like children. "Tourists? Us? Never!" the critical tourists say. "We are artists and that makes it different"...