Pau Obrador Pons

Being-on-holiday: Tourist dwelling, bodies and place

This article explores the relevance of dwelling and embodiment metaphorsin tourist studies. These metaphors make possible an account of tourism whichacknowledges the mobile and complex reality of the 21st century whilst neitherdelocalizing nor dis-embodying nor isolating tourists. In proposing such metaphors, Idevelop the possibilities of non-representational theory in tourist studies (Thrift, 1997).This article develops a perspective on tourism as a practical and embodied waythrough which we are involved in the world, we create knowledge and interact withthe physical environment; to put it in Heideggerian terms, a way of being-intheworld, of dwelling in it. This article is thus able to explore the possibilities that ideasof a situated, elusory and expressive body open in tourist studies and considers ade-centred and rhizomatic understanding of tourist agency that neither underminesthe material and non-material networks folded into the human world noroveremphasizes the human action, concealing the inevitably messy human condition.

Art Politics, memory: Tactical Tourism and the route of Anarchism in Barcelona

Since its establishment in 2001, Tactical Tourism, a group of artists based in Barcelona, has been organizing interventions in public spaces drawing on the practises and language of tourism. Their artistic interventions have generally been aimed at rescuing both personal and political memories of the city, in particular those invisible life (hi)stories hidden in everyday spaces of the city. Their projects have included Love Story, You are here, The Route of Infamy, and the Secret Guide to Barcelona. The most prominent of these interventions was the ‘Route of Anarchism’, which explored some of the more emblematic spaces and moments of the libertarian movement in Barcelona. The route was conceived as a guided tour to a hidden Barcelona, silenced and out of tourist view, the ‘red and black city’ of the anarchist movement, a Barcelona that is also known as ‘the Rose of Fire’. The original intervention took place in 2004 and was publically funded by a municipal centre for contemporary arts. The route lasted three hours and 30 minutes and was available to the public for a period of 10 days, although it was later extended due to popular demand. The route was envisaged from the very beginning as a (tourist) exercise of social and political memory. As one of the organizers explained in a newspaper interview, ‘With this route we have not attempted to summarize the history of anarchism, but to give voice to a people and a story that has often been hidden and that it is worth remembering.’ Our interest in this particular intervention arose from our participation in an adapted version of the route (or tour) in 2005, which was specially organized for an undergraduate fieldtrip to Barcelona we were leading. This route is the focus of attention of this paper.