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!
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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?
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