"SUPERHOST" /Curated by Like A Little Disaster and PANE project
a collective project with works
by:
AGF HYDRA + Callum Leo Hughes + Keiken + Sophie Mars,
Maya Ben David, Monia Ben Hamouda, Chiara Camoni, Daniela Corbascio, Stine
Deja, Débora Delmar, Andreas Ervik, Michele Gabriele, Julie Grosche, HYPERCOMF
+ George Tigkas, Motoko Ishibashi, Natalia Karczewska, Botond Keresztesi,
Andrea Kvas, Lucia Leuci, Valerio Nicolai, Ornaghi & Prestinari, Jaakko
Pallasvuo + Anni Puolakka, Nuno Patrício, Clemen Parrocchetti, Andrew
Rutherdale, Namsal Siedlecki, Micah Schippa, Mireille Tap, The Institute of
Queer Ecology, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Wisrah Villefort.
+
"Ensemble", video program curated by Julie
Grosche, with:
Lola Gonzàlez, Julie Grosche - Florian Sumi - Emma
Frost Nixon - Laura Gozlan - Edouard Le Boul’ch - Katy McCarthy - Christine
Navin - Elizabeth Orr - Laura Porter - Deirdre Sargent - Lucas Seguy - Yoan
Sorin - Marc Yearsley, Vijay Masharani, Katy McCarthy, Virginia Lee Montgomery,
Chloé Rossetti, Yoan Sorin - Florian Sumi.
+
Data and text contributions by: Murray Cox (Inside
Airbnb), Cecilia Guida, Darren Marshall, Like A Little Disaster.
4th August - 22nd October 2019
Foothold / Like a Little Disaster
Via Cavour 68
Polignano a Mare (BA)
Italy
SUPERHOST
In a totally touristified ecosystem as the one in Polignano a Mare, " SUPERHOST " uses the
strategy of camouflage as an ironic hypothesis of resistance.
" SUPERHOST " is a real/fake Airbnb that
manifests itself through an identity dissolved in a permanent chameleon-like
process.
It emerges as a complex system of presentation
strategies (of myself, of the neighbor) and of representation (of the self, of
the others) that operate according to forces at play. These forces redefine,
reorganize and re-explain the forms of the visible; they invite us to rethink
the idea of the sign and of the production of the sign, the representation and
the distortion of representation.
The interpretation of the environment of "
SUPERHOST " has nothing to do with the concepts of truth and fiction. In
its inside it is not necessary that the signs are true or false, but effective.
What is worth is the credibility of the simulacrum offered to the other, the
interactive moves and the regimes of belief and suspicion that are triggered.
The staging reiterates the maintenance of doubt, of a
"duo-habere", the failure
to find a unique solution in the observation, keeping both extremes of the
true/false cognitive couple alive.
The gaze, the interactive filter between truth and
fiction is related to the theories of "sight seeing", according to
which the tourist experience (or the experience of the contemporary consumer
tout court) would be profoundly altered due to the fact that it was
pre-selected and pre-packaged, characterized by a series of social myths
dependent on historical constructions aimed at a specific class, the wealthy
one. Massified tourism industry is born from the alienation produced by
capitalism in which even leisure and entertainment are shaped by the compulsive
character of a society folded onto its smartphone, and organized travel becomes
the emblem of the totalitarian nature of this system. The tourism industry is
totally within the cultural one. What is purchased is a symbolic capital, but
paradoxically the liberation from the world of industry takes place through the
creation of another industry.
When tourism becomes a mass phenomenon, the element
that normally necessary to the journey is the "sight", the thing that
must be seen, classified with one, two or three stars, according to its value.
The tourist knows the object as sight, that is to say as a normalized element,
worthy of being taken as an objective of an experience. The dominance of the
sight, the translation into images of things and their normalization react on
the things themselves, reducing them to the condition of a museum, a botanical
garden, a zoo or an amusement park. Like in a shop window, the things to be
seen endure a capital transformation: they are detached from their context,
deprived of their networks, of the relationship with the conditions that have
determined them and which can, itself, explain them.
SUPERHOST explores inauthenticity: in the sense that
the traveling tourist would not see the world as it really is, but only the
world that has been selected for him-her / or carefully prepared by the local
communities themselves; he would not therefore see things, their natural or cultural essence, but only their image.
The spatial articulation shaped by anxiety for the likely and the iconic,
ultimately takes on signs of signs with which we are accustomed to representing
the world, the elsewhere, the otherness.
Seduction takes the place of persuasion.
The sign is made to lie!
-
Overall, the project seeks to focus on some
topological transformations that lead from the local to the global and then
return to the local. Macro-actors are composed of micro-actors - aggregates are
not made by other material but the one they
aggregate.
Index:
I
The real effects of the immaterial capitalism.
II
The "creative destruction" practiced by the
tourism industry. Producing growth and economic development by destroying the
foundations on which that growth was based.
III
The notion of tourist-centered and its ontological relatives,
(gentrification, commodification).
- Airbnb as a tool for social and racial
discrimination.
IV
The conditions of contemporary work (and emotional
work) related to post-bio capitalism.
V
The alienation surrounding the third sector.
The concern of being replaced by the car.
VI
How to become a SUPERHOST. How to be a SUPERHOST with
one sad star.
VII
Sharing/green economy and ecological impact.
VIII
Overtourism.
IX
Plastics, pipes, sewage systems.
X
Touring Cultures: a fish market that becomes the
caricature of a fish market.
XI
Brandization of the private and public sphere.
Privatization of public space and the simultaneous public extension/ostentation
of private life.
XII
The sense of community/collectivity. The concepts of
sharing and co-existence (within a vision of the network extended to the human
- not human, to the techno - biological).
XIII
The schizophrenic ambivalence between the image of
openness and acceptance that many cities and regions seek to give of
themselves, and the contemporary global/local policies that use categories that
close and exclude.
XIV
Holidaymakers as hyper-objects.
XV
4.5 gigatonnes of CO2 each year.
XVI
Adela / Xenia.
XVII
Tourism as a form of neocolonialism
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If "nature" has taught us that diversity is
a perpetual and urgent necessity, what can happen to a territory transformed
into monoculture through a unidirectional economy?