The Get-Away-Gala, 2009
“Book your next escape on britishairways.com!” – Holidays are an attempt to escape: we want out! Out of dire economic circumstances, out of work, out of the scarcification of money, time, life: we are economic refugees. But as soon as we’re out, we land right back inside: we need a chip card in order to pass the security guard at the swimming pool, the nice locals all have something to sell to us and right away we become agents of touristic development. The tourism industry is a people smuggling operation turning our desire to escape into a business.
At the same time, tourism is a bit like theatre: Resorts are like the musical theatre among the touristic services, while the tips in the guidebooks for independent travellers can be compared to the instructions and scores of performance art. It’s about time, then, to invent tourism art, and with it new strategies for escape.
In the lecture performance GET-AWAY-GALA 1, geheimagentur presented its research on the Vietnamese island Phu Quoc and held a crash course in tourism art before, in the end, scholarships were awarded for excursions into a different tourism. Two weeks later, after everyone had returned, GET-AWAY-GALA 02 celebrated tourism as an art form: in a travel fair for Tourism Art, visitors could learn about destinations such as Crete, Island, Lampedusa, or Sunny Beach, and with that about holidays in the economic crisis, about the history of the Bulgarian tourism industry or the potentials for solidarity among tourists and migrants. [And again, GET-AWAY-GALA 02 ended with a prize draw for a travel grant for emerging tourism artists.]
Sommerfestival Kampnagel Hamburg, August 2009