Tour-isms. The Defeat of Dissent

Tour-isms. The Defeat of Dissent investigates different manifestations of tourism to work towards a critical analysis of the influence of this global phenomenon in contemporary society.

Tourism as migration of cultures, objects and people, but also as a new mobility of capitals, cities and history, of fictions, of myths, of discourses and values, and most of all a permanent mobility of images.

Tourism conceived as a political and cultural phenomenon, in full expansion thanks to the globalising process of late capitalism which, together with the consumer and leisure society and the information, communication and transport technologies, is radically transforming our territories and (space-time) perception of the world. A contemporary practice, mobility, yet different according to the place one is speaking from: perpetual present and pure space, deterritorialised, for the globalised; impossibility of the present and physically confined space for the localised. The uses of time and space are clearly differentiated and at the same time they themselves differentiate.

The pursuit of happiness, the desire for escape, the discovery of the Other and the return to nature are, according to some tourism analysts, the generators of the imaginaries of desire when it comes to embarking on a journey. A critical analysis of these constructed imaginaries which will reveal some of the mechanisms which induce that desire in capitalist society has been the impulse behind this project.

Tour-isms is structured through two interconnected realities, the “tourist-subject”, a subject who activates environments and standardised memories legitimised by the individuality of experience and exploration; and an agent of transformation, a social player actively involved in processes of transformation of the territories s/he visits. And the “touristified spaces”, which reveal some of the economic, political and cultural processes which impose new forms of socialisation and new uses and behaviours on the borders of private and public, what is and what can be historical.

Tour-isms does not set out to make a totalising analysis of tourism or to offer a historical future for it, nor does it wish to propose a superficial criticism of tourism or the tourist or to establish new models for this practice. Tour-isms is a transversal project which links a series of people and groups who, from their work in the spheres of geography, history, sociology, cultural criticism, audiovisual practices, architecture, photography, literature or cinema, reveal certain keys to the mechanisms of the representation generated by tourist discourse and penetrate, as far as possible, the social, political and economic strategies which are behind an activity which increasingly defines the relations, images and spaces of our contemporary world.