Sean Carter

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.

Hollywood and the ‘War on Terror’: Genre-Geopolitics and ‘Jacksonianism’ in The Kingdom

This paper explores the popular geopolitics of Hollywood cinema in the years since the terror attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001. During this time there has been a surprisingly varied and wide-ranging output of mainstream US movies that take either 9/11, or the consequential ‘war on terror’, as their primary context. We look at one such film in particular, the 2007 film The Kingdom, directed by Peter Berg. Set in Saudi Arabia, the film centres around an FBI-led investigation into a terrorist attack on an American civilian compound. In discussing the narrative and discursive elements of the film, and their relationship to the geopolitics of the war on terror, we also seek to build on recent conceptual developments in popular geopolitics. In particular, we argue that a greater recognition and understanding of the visuality of the geopolitics of film is required. We do this in two main ways. First, we suggest that attention needs to be paid to how images in films are put together. Here we use the notion of montage to show how film produces imaginative maps of connectivity, which in this context bear relation to the production of a series of ‘extraterritorialities’ in the war on terror. Second, we contend that greater attention to the notion of genre (in this case the action-thriller) can provide productive forms of analysis. More specifically, we argue that the action-thriller genre has certain political tendencies, especially towards what has been termed Jacksonianism.