To Tour or Not

Abstract

On Critical Tourism, Site-Specificity & the Post-Romantic Condition Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts Nida, Lithuania May 16-19, 2013 Located on the Lithuanian Curonian Spit forty-five kilometers south of Klaipeda, minutes away from the Russian border near Kaliningrad, is Nida, an obscure, seaside resort town that once hosted primarily Lithuanians and Germans--including artists and writers such as Thomas Mann and Jean-Paul Sartre. Nida Art Colony exists in this tiny village--a remote gem of colonial cottages sequestered near pine forests, rustic German architecture, amber jewelry, folk art, and archaic fishing boats designed to handle rough waters. It is a space of respite--where many retreat inward and leave urban responsibilities behind, even if temporarily. Despite the fact that this place seems safe and well-preserved, the fairytale-like Nida is constantly in flux. It exists on an ever-evolving strip of manmade sand serving to impede incoming ocean waves and unexpected maelstroms. The sand dunes continually shift, but the unique site itself remains, despite its inherent fragility. It is intriguing to ponder how the spit remains as protected and seemingly untouched as it has in the Baltics, where similar tourist locales are strategically exploited, quickly altered, or destroyed by an influx of visitors and capitalistic persuasions. Co-curated by Vytautas Michelkevicius and Federica Martini, there were approximately forty participants present at the On Critical Tourism symposium: international artists and artists groups in residence, visiting artists, curators, academics, researchers, critics, and locals. The event shifted between performances, discussions, guided tours, performative walks, role-playing, dinners, workshops, tea rituals, readings, casual conversation, and knowledge exchange. It harbored coinciding ambitions one being to gather a diverse range of creatives, researchers, and practitioners to investigate and experiment with ways to share art and related experiences; roles such as curator and are changing, and borders between such positions are being reevaluated. How do we step out of our comfort zones and into other realms of artistic research? Can we embrace more than one role simultaneously and with an experimental, playful perspective as opposed to stringent academic research methods? The symposium aspired to highlight aspects of site specificity, with stints into critical alternative methods of artistic and cultural production, ecology, and the history of the Curonian Spit (a UNKSCO world heritage site) alongside the Baltic's post-romantic state and current reality. Various keywords and topics were contextualized, from artist-as-tourist and sightseeing as artistic research, to nostalgia tourism, local, and standardized identities. Symposium days were filled with sunlight, pristine beaches, fresh faces, and converging ideas. It all began on Nida's sand dunes with a performative talk-walk led by the Contingent Movements Archive, including London-based artists Hanna Husberg, Laura McLean, and Kalliopi Tsipni-Kolaza, who together represented the Maldives at the 55th Venice Biennale. Comparisons were made between Nida's fragile milieu and that of the Maldives, as both regions are at risk of disappearing into the sea. The artist group led participants through marshes and dunes toward the Kaliningrad border, referencing the politics and history of both areas. Following this, Barnaby Drabble Zurich-based freelance curator, writer, and managing editor of jar-online.net--introduced the symposium with a comprehensive, practice-based presentation and workshop focused, not on being organized or self-organized, but disorganized. Highlights from his presentation included work by Dutch artist Jeroen Offerman, among others emphasizing the artist's obsessive, oftentimes repetitive nature. Overman's Stairway at St. …