Ant Hampton: Detouristiki

A series of after-dark street performances, interventions, transformations, and provocations rescuing “beauty” from mass tourism or “overtourism” and refiguring/reclaiming it as an inclusive commons of restorative imagination and power. An operation centered around subtle, sublime actions. Rituals of exquisite exorcism, for and with a certain kind of “beautiful” public space, at a certain hour, assembling and challenging a mixed audience of locals and tourists whose capacities have been manipulated or threatened by mass tourism.

The formats of the performances would likely involve this audience gathering in a specific location: places on the periphery of heavy tourism which at night become quiet, magical, available. Initial research and development in Palermo, Sicily, will take place in October 2024 during the Teatro Bastardo Festival.

“Detouristiki” is planned to move around southern Europe and beyond, in a semi-autonomous way – partly in collaboration with arts organizations, partly self-financed by “ticket sales” from the street. Contactless payment offers a contactless experience, while cash payments produce more embodied results. Personal sacrifices can also be negotiated, but for this street performance you pay up front, not after.

The work is fueled by different impulses: a resistance to the many injustices demanded and engendered by mass tourism, and an intersectional understanding of the degrowth imperative, which includes the urgent need to rewire desire, a task that demands radical imagination fused with research. Given that many places in southern Europe are already on their knees in terms of their ecosystems, with the brutal boom of overtourism promising a coup de grâce, the project will inevitably and deliberately lean at times towards lament, if not rage, also as a necessary wake-up call or provocation.

What kind of tourism, if not mass tourism? Why is it that in “beautiful” holiday destinations, cultural events are so often bland and unimaginative? How about a tourism that doesn’t expect us to jettison intellectual curiosity or personal responsibility? Can we be tourists actively interested in the reality of what is happening where we end up on holidays, exploring it with the same energy, hunger, and curiosity conventionally applied to site-seeing, leisure, shopping, or consumption?

“Detouristiki” can be seen as an “onboarding” for this new, barely existing tourism; an Arte Útil with one foot in speculation or proposal, the other stepping forward with concrete actions. In this sense, any advertising, or lure, will be as important to the overall project as the performances. Posters, street actions, conversations with individuals, as well as rumor, hoax, provocation, and media hijacking will all be experimented and developed along with a DeTour Guide app for scenes requiring location-based audio and audience routing.

For and with:

• visitors and locals attracted by a call to escape and question the manipulations, clichés, and false promises of mass tourism by witnessing and participating in “Detouristiki”, at a certain location and at a certain hour
• DeTour Guides: performers (Elpida Orphanidou and Konstantina Messini) and non-professional performers and guests with specific insight into the spaces in question.

DeTour Guides broker a coming-together of locals and aliens who can approach each other in a spirit of mutual curiosity. The usual dynamics (client-dealer, exploitation, exclusion) are flattened through a shared act of witnessing, in this exceptional “third” space: a performance which becomes both more local and more alien than anyone present.