Aquatic complexities. Tourism, aesthetics and dis:connections.

Commercial tourism brochures and posters paint a connective picture of holiday destinations. Images adorned with sun, beaches and the turquoise sea attract millions of travellers annually and fuel cultural exchange, the connection of remote places and job creation. This workshop will concentrate on commercial and non-commercial visual arts that reflect the tensions between water, the sea, rain — referents of the Latin aqua — and tourism. When dealing with water as the most important resource of tourism, whether fresh or salty, in natural or artificial basins, these works relate to complexities such as interruptions, pauses, frictions and absences that always go along with the connections that water-based tourism promotes.

This workshop welcomes thinkers and practitioners from art, design and architecture (history and theory), cultural and literary studies to discuss the many ways in which aesthetic creations and designed environments surrounding water-based tourism visually comment, mediate and influence global dis:connections – past, present and future. Historical and contemporary visual works that treat water as an image, a material, medium, means, environment and eco-system can illuminate the ubiquitous but overshadowed interdependencies of global entanglements and disentanglements in tourism. The works reinterrogate the sensorial aspects of leisure design and the connections it generates between the mediated destinations and the consumers with regard to water-related dis:connections.

The workshop covers a wide range of aquatic complexities: we consider the rising sea level and the disappearance of many destinations, environments and cultures; infrastructures and tourist gazes that both connect and disconnect destinations and visitors; the glocal design of maritime architectures and bodies; ecological devastations due to the over-exploitation of water in tourism; islands, beaches, hotels and pools as sites of (im)mobility, social inclusion and exclusion, and of conflicts between local communities and global power structures.

By theorising on aquatic complexities as visualised in manifold aesthetic practices, genres and methods, this event fosters alternative ways to approach globalisation from the perspectives of the humanities and the arts while contributing to non-hegemonic art history.

PROGRAMME:

Wednesday, 11 September 2024

16:30 Welcome and introduction
DESIGN TALK
17:00 Ivica Mitrović (Arts Academy, University of Split): Adriatic: notes for the future
Followed by a discussion moderated by Julian Stalter
18:30 Dinner

Thursday, 12 September 2024

MARITIME INFRASTRUCTURES AND THE TOURIST GAZE
Chair: Valeska Huber
9:00 Jonathan Stafford (The Leibnitz-Center for Literary and Cultural Research, ZfL, Berlin): Democratising the sublime: spectacular danger and the rise of mass leisure by the sea
9:45 Eva-Maria Troelenberg (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf): ‘Venice is threatened every year with a new transportation device’. Visual histories and infrastructures of mobility in Venice
10:30 Coffee break

WATER, DESIGN AND ‘GLOCALITY’
Chair: Hanni Geiger
11:00 Panayiota Pyla (University of Cyprus): Hotel waterscapes: the aesthetics, economics and politics of pools and beaches in Cyprus
11:45 Chelsea Haines (Arizona State University): Redrawing the Mediterranean: Dora Gad’s yam tikhoniut
12:30 Lunch

GENDER, LEISURE AND MIGRATION
Chair: Anna Messner
14:00 Hanna Büdenbender (Saarland University): Female body and the sea: representations of mermaids and South Sea maidens between the local and the global
14:45 Burcu Dogramaci (global dis:connect / LMU Munich): Valeska Gert's Ziegenstall on Sylt Island: transatlantic exile and a cabaret bar as a place of return
15:30 Coffee break

ARTIST TALK – IN CONVERSATION
Chair: Boris Čučković Berger
16:00 Hanni Geiger (global dis:connect): On leisure and limbo. Adriatic nodes of tourism and migration
Artist response by Ilir Tsouko (Berlin/Tirana/Athens/Priština)
Discussion
17:15 Concluding remarks

Concept and organisation: Hanni Geiger, Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, Munich.

You can download the flyer and register here: https://www.globaldisconnect.org/03/13/11-12-september-aquatic-complexities-tourism-aesthetics-and-disconnections/