Suchergebnisse

Many small island destinations owe their spatial character to their entanglements with stakeholders involved in the arts. Space is the dynamic outcome of complex relational processes, which makes it impossible to identify a straightforward development path - including when it comes to the arts and tourism. Using assemblage thinking, we scrutinize the different translocal processes influencing art-based tourism activities on Bornholm, Denmark and Naoshima, Japan. On these islands, artists, investors, residents, destination managers, creative individuals, and government officials are all involved in networks and negotiations that form complex translocal assemblages of art and tourism. The craft-artists of Bornholm took advantage of regional development policies aimed at fostering rural tourism development, and subsequently established a destination known for quality professional craft art. On Naoshima, top-down corporate investments in large-scale art developments have clashed with local stakes in rural revitalization. These top-down projects have attracted creative in-migrants who have further turned Naoshima into a hybrid space. While Bornholm's entanglement with the arts stems from the possibilities generated by its spatial evolution, Naoshima's involvement with the arts first led to reterritorialization and then creative enhancement. Both islands are, thus, distinct loci of translocal art trajectories.

This symposium examines the relations between biopower, destination governance and tourism. Biopower, a Foucauldian concept, refers to political strategies based on humanity's biological features. In the simplest of terms, it is applied via biopolitical mandates that govern life of a given population. Contemporary tourism exemplifies the exertion of biopower over the mobility of travellers, as was evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to a lesser degree, continues to do so. The role that tourism plays in enabling authorities to enact spatial transformations reinforcing state power, while also indicating potential means of resistance, is foregrounded in this symposium. The four empirical contributions extend biopolitical thought by demonstrating that biopower is instrumental in the practices and regimes of mobility, security, in/exclusion of tourism. In Europe, the Dutch government experimented with enclosed "COVID-safe" tourist spaces. In Macao, China's border regime screened tourists based on their viral threat capacities. On Naoshima Island in Japan, museums have transformed into infrastructures of bodily control. In Taiwan, flight attendants are grappling with newly emerging forms of biopower shaping the sociality of air travel and their own practices of hospitality. These empirically informed contributions interrogate how tourism figures in attempts to govern bodies at the population level, while uncovering the modes of coercion applied to govern tourists and the spaces they inhabit.