Tourist Yourself!  by Daniel Vander Gucht, sociologue, professeur à l’université libre de Bruxelles, October 2009

In a little book, to be read during a train or plane journey, Ecce homo touristicus (sub-titled « Identity, memory and heritage in an era of the  world-wide museum » (Brussels Labor, 2006), I evoked what seemed to me to be our progressive but irresistible transformation into tourists of our own culture – this mutation of our own human condition to that of homo touristicus as such contributes to create what I would call the patrimonial syndrome.   This patrimonial syndrome seems to seal the destiny of the museums of the world and maintain the tourist industry – it results in the colonization of the cultural domain which in turn leads to cultural heritage and museums becoming indispensable assets of the tourist  industry.

We continue however to flatter ourselves that we are travellers – the aristocracy of gregarious movement and seasonal exodus – or citizens of the world – a democratic and world-wide version of « a man of the world », reserving our mocking condescension for the tourist, who is always someone else.   In each tourist however there lies a degree of curiosity that awakens to the reality of the world as it is.   And, if no-one appears to regret the heroic past of explorers and adventurers, declaring that each journey is therefore impossible, we could respond to them by saying that aventure is always just around the corner, in as much as we remain open to the world and to the  emergence of the unknown,  to ordinary encounters with others – where indeed nothing is ordinary.   To this end, the simple tourist proves to be  an easy scape-goat.   This inclination of the modern man remains – this homo touristicus – to become a tourist of his own existance, a spectator of his own memory.

Mass tourism in part linked to the museum as with photography (which allows the inhabitant the apparition of the imaginary Museum, dear to André Malraux).  But the museum, as with photography, is a pretext to help us to see better and to better remember, but does it not in reality dispense us from looking and exercising our memory as a cultural tourist, trained to recognize rather than know and to gather pictures of the world rather than becoming involved?     In terms of being elsewhere, the tourist, onlooker rather than traveller, even though he still dreams of adventure, seeks to recognize typical cliches, proposed by post cards and picture books from his childhood.   It is the reproduction and repetition of this exotic emotion that the tourist seeks by means of his his quest for « authentic scenery », and not a meeting with reality or the truth of a country, its people or a living culture.   The tourist, that we all are, travels in reality to recognize places and views seen in magazines, catalogues, on the television or the cinema, in exactly the same way as one goes to the museum to confirm that the originals match their copies.

This touristic  experience in a deferred and  mediatic world through photographs of views is further multiplied by the numeric fever, which no longer requires that one travels the world in search of such views, when avatars of ourselves take care of presenting them via Internet, posing in a convincing and casual manner in front of views and sites recognized through just a glimpse of  our collective memory.   A stranger to himself, far from the « I am another » by Rimbaud (although ……), the ultimate tourist may indeed take himself to be another, as presented by Stéphane Damsin with his « album souvenir », entitled « Me on Holidays or Alter est Ego », where deterioration is cancelled out through the virtual interchange and repetition of the same.   And, through this gap between the relationship as one looks on faced with these crowds of tourists who are literally trying to make the world disappear behind a blinding multitude of pictures, and that of the blind tourist mechanically perpetuating himself in a rituel of elimination of the world through insignificant photographis, which in turn become an object of observation, surveillance and control.   In other words, what appears to be,  without seeming to have been addressed,  and with an economy of means, the mechanism imagined by the same Stéphane Damsin in his new project, May I take your picture?