The traveller
is alone. The traveller is not alone. The traveller is stuck in mass
tourism. The traveller is mass tourism. But city itself is gone. As Goethe
once echoed: See Naples and die. Indeed. Let us also say: Let Naples be seen by
too many and it will die. The classical educational journey is long gone. Long
gone are also the days where the courteous traveller sat for hours depicting
the views of the city in watercolour or wrote profound poems in a notebook. The
educational traveller’s desire for enlightenment is replaced with the tourist’s
fear of missing out. And yet, they miss out. The city itself takes the stage
only as a backdrop for the traveller’s self-desire and conformity-seeking self-representation.
The original carnival is displaced with a lost nomadic congregation desperate only
for acknowledgement in social media.
It’s not
personal. The people in my images do not represent themselves. They represent a
wider conception of excessive tourism, wherein lies equal parts terror, beauty,
happiness, weariness and sorrow. What the locals might perceive as a horrendous
invasion by a displacing horde, is also an invasion by a crowd filled with joy,
desire and ecstasy. An external viewer
acknowledges this but must also acknowledge his or her participation in it.
I have had
a visual and sociological interest in tourism for many years, but only lately
have I had the right tool to execute it. A plain depiction would be unheard of,
as contemporary tourism is a distortion. A distorted representation is in
place, much in the same fashion carnival masks are distorted representations of
human aspects. The mutual view is distorted.
One should
consider the ethics of a project like this on the same level as ethics for mass
tourism. If there exists a self-entitlement to swarm a place of cultural
interest, there also exists a self-entitlement to make a visual representation
of this phenomenon on the phenomenon’s premise. It’s not personal. We are all
in it.
This series
contains around 100 images, and I have submitted five of them for Arte Laguna.
