Guided Tours in the Comfort of Your Own Home

Considering the issues and challenges of tourism at a time when the immobility of the pandemic has given way to a phenomenal surge in a desire to travel, when creative art residencies are increasing in rural areas so that art can reconnect with nature, and when major biennials are calling into question their historical colonialism — while knowing that the tourism industry is responsible for almost 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions: all this certainly elicits a fair share of cognitive dissonance. Yes, an important environmental awareness emerges, which leads informed travellers to engage in ecotourism or sustainable tourism. Yet are we actually witnessing a real desire to transform the tourism industry? Or is it in fact a powerful greenwashing campaign or a “worldphagy,”1 1  - “One of the paradoxes of tourism today is to kill the very thing being experienced, like a true worldphagy parasite.” Rodolphe Christin, Manuel de l’antitourisme (Montréal: Éditions Écosociété, 2017, our translation). The rise of environmentally responsible travel does not, however, erase this worldphagy. greened to justify extractivist behaviour? The recent emergence of a form of travel called “last-chance tourism,” motivated by a discovery of places doomed to disappear due to climate change, is distressing even the strongest optimists. The harshest cynics, on the other hand, see this as an additional expression of a rapidly growing egotourism.

By having to be open to the world, art is particularly affected by the global challenges of movement. At the time of publishing this issue, the art scene is being monopolized by the 60th Venice Biennale (whose theme, incidentally, is Foreigners Everywhere), an event that now has been extended by a few weeks to attract more tourists and generate more profit. For many in the art world, this is a period when the much-vaunted FOMO (fear of missing out) is most sharply felt, while photos of works, art events, and legendary places skyrocket on social media. During the Biennale, Venice becomes the hot spot of contemporary art, the place where one must go to see and be seen — like Corvo Island is for ornithologists in the fall.² 2 - See Scott Rogers’s essay in this issue. Those who don’t wish to contribute to the Venetian overtourism envision practising JOMO (joy of missing out).