Vincent van Gogh, Les Arènes (http://arthipstory.com/2014/11/11/les-arenes/)
“No, I did not just shop,” my aunt said indignantly. She had a bit of a reputation for being a shopaholic in the family and had just been accused of circumventing the cultural wealth of the beautiful Amsterdam in favour of good value leather booties.
But she had exceeded herself on this trip and had ventured into an art museum,
“I went to the Van Gogh, and I can prove it!” My aunt gleamed as she rushed over to her bookcase and pulled down the triangular poster-box in the familiar blue and yellow palette of the Van Gogh Museum’s marketing campaign.
“I didn’t much like the poster in the end,” she confessed, “But the box is great!” She went on to tell us how a man on the flight home had asked her how she’d liked the museum after noticing her box: she’s been initiated into the elite community of the cultured tourist.
On speaking to my other aunt, who had accompanied her on the trip, the truth of the museum-visit came out. The two of them had strolled past a couple of paintings and had then rushed to the museum gift shop, where they’d spent hours fanning over reproductions of paintings, deciding which poster would best match the colour schemes of their guest-bedrooms.
It’s pretty easy, once you’ve made the initially painful investment of that flight-ticket, to hop on a plane and mindlessly follow the masses down the well-trodden paths of mass tourism.
Carefully advertised and signposted museum visits and city tours punctuate every great metropolis. Now any professional seeking a retreat from the stress of decision-making can latch onto the next city-bus tour in the blink of an iPhone screen.
These standardised excursions also take care of your moral status. They’ll make sure you visit the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the Notre Dame in Paris and, of course, the Van Gogh in Amsterdam. Afterwards you’ll be able to parade your souvenirs around as unambiguous trophees; proof that you have done your duty as a citizen of the world, that you did not only vegetate on beaches and drink cocktails, that you engaged with the culture and history of a foreign place.
Convenient? Yes. Enlightening? Probably not.
Of course, the task we have been issued with as tourists is vague and near to impossible; what does it mean to “really get to know a place”, or “to immerse yourself in a culture” (especially when you’re only there for a quick weekend break)?
But nonetheless I want to insist, given that we are travelling more than ever before, that it is becoming increasingly important that we do this self-reflexively. Tourists, you see, are starting to get a bit of a bad rapport.
Europe, for one, has a tourism problem. Even though the European Commission adheres to policies that aim to make “European tourism more competitive, modern, sustainable and responsible” (European Parliamentary Research Service), many cities claim to be bursting at the seams with the travellers flocking into their packed centres.
The irony is that tourism is integral to the European identity. Europe is an economic partnership predicated on the sharing and flow of professionals and tourists, and the knowledge and commerce they bring with them. A knowledge economy that has made the figure of the elite cosmopolitan the prototype of the European citizen. Take the Schengen Agreement of 26 March 1995. This ensured that travellers of any nationality could travel freely between Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and Portugal without passport controls. This has since been expanded: testament to the emphasis on tourism in the European Union’s economic policies.
The importance of tourism is tied up with the emphasis on citizenship that is used to define the still often-disputed ‘European identity’; it is, in a sense, the rights of citizenship that make a person European. As the Treaty of Amsterdam states,
“As set out in the Maastricht Treaty, any national of a member state is a citizen of the European Union. The aim of European citizenship is to strengthen and consolidate European identity by greater involvement of the citizens in the community integration process.” (European Union 2000)
Tourism and culture, in this context, have also become attempts to involve the citizen in the community integration process. Tourism, from this policy perspective, becomes a tool for cultural exchange: tourists bring cultures to the host, while the tourist, the argument goes, takes these influences home with them. The dissemination of culture generated by tourism will in this way foster a collective sense of European identity. Cultural and tourism programmes, such as the European Capitals of Culture, form part of this effort to shape ‘Europeanness’.
Yet this coveted tourism is often met with hostility on the ground. Visiting Barcelona this summer, I was repeatedly distracted from the impressive sights of the Sacra Familia or Parc Guell by the impassioned scrawlings across city walls telling us “tourists” to “go home”. These statements respond to the city’s tourism boom over the past years: annual tourists have more than tripled from 1.7 million in 1990 to an expected 7.5 million in 2015 (Global Advisor). The influx of foreigners has not only driven up house prices in the centre, but has also corrupted scenic neighbourhoods with noise, vulgarity and drinking. Ada Colau, Barcelona’s mayor, has introduced a series of policies aimed at combating the tourist invasion, echoing a common fear amongst Europeans, that this city too will be the next victim of so-called “UNESCOcide”, or “Venice syndrome”, describing a situation in which tourism has completely displaced local life, and cities become museums that fall into desolation when the tourist season has passed.
6:44 p.m. – 21 May 2015 (Martaballesta (Twitter)
Amsterdam is having similar problems. Here, too, tourism has taken its toll on local life. The glaring marketing campaign that has dropped “Iamsterdam” signs at key-locations throughout the city simultaneously marks ‘no-go zones’ for locals. “The signs are pretty useful, you know exactly which areas to avoid if you don’t want masses of tourists blocking your bike-path”, one local said.
Image by Chasing Destinations
Yet it’s not just museum-going tourists that haunt Amsterdam’s city-centre. While drunken mobs are perhaps a more recent development in Barcelona, Amsterdam has had to deal with decrepit morality in its city centre for a while; I am talking, of course, about its tolerance of marijuana and prostitution. The tourists who flock to the city centre invariably stop by the famous Red Light District and marvel at the living, breathing tokens of Liberalism on display in its brothel-windows. There are various degrees and manifestations of this curiosity of course, one of which is the staggeringly drunk stag-weekend-attending Englishman. Drunk and unruly, these chappies slanter along the canals, uttering profanities and barfing at street-corners. These are the wailing ghouls haunting the city centre, and the locals want nothing to do with them.
This is not to say that every city doesn’t attract its own strain of hooligans and there are, of course, plenty of civilised Europeans who, thankfully, approach Amsterdam with a less narcotics-motivated agenda. My point is that if Europe intends to stay true to its commitment to breeding well-traveled and so-called ‘cultured’ individuals, cities themselves have a responsibility to cater for the more conscientious tourist.
But I’m not just talking about rehabilitating the drunk tourists and redirecting them to Museums. My aunt’s little cultural diversion shows that even following the ‘civilised’ masses to the Van Gogh or The Louvre isn’t enough. If all we are going to do is mop up the latest shipment of postcards from China in the museum gift shop, we’ll be fostering an empty cultural identity; the stuff of Selfies and empty slogans.
It seems that, leaving aside the questions of whether travelling around Europe can generate a shared European identity, it would go far to easing some of the tensions between locals and their seasonal visitors, if we found a less hostile meeting space for locals and tourists, a way in which we all engage with culture in a meaningful way.
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Framer Framed Gallery Overlooking The IJ River
To my eyes there are two important points of attention for the city’s cultural attractions to address its local-tourist divide: a) get them away from the centre and b) offer them viable alternatives, or at least additions, to passive, large-scale tourism.
Let me give you one of my favourite examples in the art scene in Amsterdam.
Beyond the gems on the Dutch crown like Rembrandt and Van Gogh, you might want to consider straying into the North of Amsterdam for art that will speak to visitors from far and wide. Here, in a glass-walled gallery space overlooking the river ‘IJ’, you’ll find Framer Framed. The organisation, in its own words, is “an initiative to discuss the politics of representation and curatorial practices in the 21st century”. The space hosts rotating exhibitions by different curators, each of which relates to different social, political and historical themes. In an attempt to invite public interaction and critique, the exhibitions are only the starting point for a diverse public programme: from performances, to debates, to DJ-workshops and tours of the city; audiences are invited to take part in discussions on important contemporary topics. Instead of elbowing your way past other tourists just to get a glimpse of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, here you’ll get a front row seat to performances that raise questions equally relevant to tourists and locals, and in fact benefit from the expression of different perspectives.
Take, for example, the upcoming exhibition “Ancestral Blues: The Return to the State of L3”, an exhibition that exhibits the work of a collective of artists of African diaspora across three continents in order to offer new modes of identification for people with African ancestry. Themes of exchange, transformation and migration are used to discuss and surpass discussions of the colonial past.
The Framer Framed website will announce the varied public events surrounding the exhibit. Many of these draw on the city of Amsterdam and its specific history to reflect on the themes of the exhibition. In this way, the gallery offers a unique angle on Amsterdam; one that is likely to divert you from the beaten tracks of mass tourism, and puts you in direct contact with locals. I’m not asking anyone to give up their visits to a city’s ‘must-sees’, but initiatives such as Framer Framed might help us to formulate an urban vocabulary in which ‘tourist’ no longer features as a universal curse.
Related posts:
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