Tuesday 21 June 2016

The Imaginative Tourist Trail for the New Forest Arts Festival 2016



The Imaginative Tourist Trail is a social art project I am currently running as part of Everyday Tourist Collective (ETC) with Noriko Suzuki-Bosco and Dr Yvonne Jones. The project was commissioned for the New Forest Arts Festival 2016 and explores the notion of authentic experience of place when it is seen through someone a fictitious frame. We have produced an edition of 200 Interactive Trail Guides / maps in the hope that visitors will engage with the 2.6 mile trail, beginning at The Fighting Cocks pub at Godshill in the New Forest, to produce alternative narratives of the area. We printed the guides using risograph technology and included a series of prompts indexed to eleven alternative tourist sites on the trail. The prompts have are not drawn from historical facts or official narratives relating to the sites and were designed to trigger the imaginations of participants and to inspire them to see the seemingly mundane through new eyes. We hope that the project will help visitors to re-image mundane rural sites and to generate a rich, multi-layered palimpsest of experiences indicating the complex nature of our engagement with place as mediated through both official narratives and emergent and unfolding understandings of our temporal, spatial and imaginative relations to site. All responses are submitted anonymously and have been used to conduct artist-led misguided tours, which have been taking place every Saturday during the course of the festival.


Noriko Suzuki-Bosco and Dr Yvonne Jones


Based on the understanding that tourism offers a way of shaping people’s experience of reality through narrative, the two week project hopes to bring into question the notions of authorship and authenticity in both art and tourism. Specifically referring to Foucault's concerns about who authorises the author within 'the functioning conditions of specific discursive practices' (Foucault, 1998), we have attempted to facilitate an imaginative environment in which participants are able to mediate between personally authentic place meanings and those authorised by cultural and institutional discourse to develop their own versions of ‘truth’. Indeed, our belief in narratives or histories as absolute truths, limits our experience of reality. Experiencing a place through a fictitious frame not only questions the authenticity of experience but also allows us to engage with reality as imaginative play.



ETC's Tourist Misinformation Station





















The Imaginative Tourist Trail 
 





Interactive Trail Guide (edition of 200)



 

No comments:

Post a Comment