Installation view, site-seeing: disneyfication of cities?,
Künstlerhaus Wien, A (mit / with Elsebeth Jørgensen)


The tourist moves on paths, which are often carefully arranged for him, and which are repeatedly walked by new visitors, taking new photographs. Via the tourist snapshot an ongoing reinventing, revisiting and re-photographing of places is happening.
The Tourist was first produced for the exhibition “Ingrepp” at Uppsala Konstmuseum in Sweden, and later redone in Vienna for the exhibition “site-seeing – disneyfication of cities” at Künstlerhaus Wien. It consists of a temporary collection of photographs of places in and around the city.
For 8 days we talk to tourists on public places, we asked them where they came from, where they found their information about the city, and which places they had heard about and were going to visit or already had visited. We asked them where they would recommend us to go and to photograph. We visited these places, photographed and talked to new tourists, and in this process a collection of photographs was build up.
“The Tourist” is a touristic mapping of the town, a temporary image-bank of places that tourists have recommended to us and possibly have or would have photographed them selves.
The photographs were mounted on blocks of woods and the visitors in the exhibitions were invited to take one with them. The central information of the tourists we talked to (estimated age, nationality, where we met them and what they recommended) was presented in the exhibitions, as well as a graphic presentation of the visited and recommended sites and the connections between them.