The Caribbean: An Interview with Annalee Davis

In a different context but a relatable reality is the work and practice of the artist Annalee Davis. We interviewed Davis to better understand the struggle against mass tourism in Barbados and the place of art in advancing a critical view to oppose mega-developments by the tourist industry in the Caribbean.

CR: With all the signs of global environmental catastrophe and amid COVID-19, are we as a postcolonial nation asking what a future tourist economy would look like in the context of hotels emptying out? Have the decades-long warnings of global warming taught eager developers little to nothing?

AD: While the extractive practices of first-world countries are the main contributors to our environmental problems, we cannot ignore how resource strained Caribbean governments pattern their own models of development on cloth cut by our colonial histories, unceasingly threatening the human and ecological well-being of this region.

In the early nineties, I was responding to heated national debates questioning the future of a landscape caught between a sugar industry with its weighty associations with slavery, sugar production costs that were among the highest in the world, and the development of tropical islands as exoticized playgrounds for foreigners, catered to through the development of golf courses, ever grander hotels and possibly casinos. ​My work “The Things We Worship” (figure below) exposed contradictions that, if left to prevailing market trends, would go unchallenged.

It consisted of an altarpiece activated during a 1992 performance at the dilapidated Vaucluse sugar factory as part of a one-day ‘happening’ called ​Art Over Sugar​. When closed, the altar displays a central image of a rural Barbadian landscape flanked on one side by a fish out of water and sugar cane at sea. On the reverse side is a line-drawing of a rural landscape tapering off to a ‘cut along the dotted line’ – eagerly followed by scissors – a reference to unscrupulous permissions granted for subdividing prime agricultural land for housing lots and golf courses, requiring the use of pesticides and copious quantities of water in an already water-scarce country.

CR: These precedents against tourism situate today’s climate emergency into a much larger view of human agency. It follows what scholars have also termed the plantationocene to contest the already accepted Anthropocene and acknowledging the role that plantations and colonialism have played in this age of human destruction.

AD: How do small island developing states revise the tourist economy so that our best resources and natural assets aren’t preserved for only those who can afford it. During COVID, the government of Barbados offered our coastline as a berthing station for cruise ships to have a ‘safe’ harbor when no other Caribbean islands would have them. Now we understand that their anchors weighing 5 tonnes with 300 meters of heavy anchor chains, swinging on the ocean bed, has caused rampant damage to thousands of square meters of our coral reefs as the chain drags back and forth in a 180-degree arc. This will take more than 100 years to rejuvenate. So while we have loyalty from cruise ship companies who want to and will ply their trade when we reopen to tourism, we have lost some of our precious reefs. Fairtrade?

Alternatives: Nanotourism and Curation as Hospitality

Architects and founders of the working group AAnanotourism, Tina Gregoric, and Aljosa Dekleva, propose the term nanotourims as “an alternative that describes and criticizes the environmental, social and economic downsides of conventional tourism while taking into consideration the protection and enhancement of the local heritage, development of responsible economies and social inclusion.” They suggest a reexamination of the very meaning of the 𝘵𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘵::

“tourist is an increasingly used term that more often implies a shallow interest in the cultures or environments.” To better the systems that promote encroaching structures of mass tourism, the concept, and more importantly, the practice of nanotourism, becomes a social tool that stimulates mutual interactions and “aims to confront the current realities and presumptions on tourism. [...] Instead, Nanotourism suggests becoming a 𝘕𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘵 who drifts away from superficial one-way observation towards a participatory two-way relationship of exchange or co-creation.”

The term and notion of nanotourism were defined further by a cross-disciplinary team in the process of working theory during BIO50 - 24th Biennial of Design Ljubljana. Since 2014 the annually held AA nanotourism Visiting School program visits different locations worldwide to investigate further into nanotourism by researching, designing, and making prototypes of nanotourism experiences. Nanotourism grew into a platform of individuals and institutions collaborating on nanotourism by conducting theoretical research, finding experiences, organizing and participating in workshops, talks, exhibitions, and applying this knowledge by creating new case studies.

To best introduce the concept and practice of nanotourism we examined the impact that KSEVT - Cultural Centre of European Space Technologies has had in the small village of Vitanje in central Slovenia. An old community center building was removed to provide space for the new KSEVT building, which was designed to facilitate Space Technologies' research and honor the work of Herman Potočnik Noordung - a Slovene rocket engineer and pioneer of astronautics.

In a village of 600 inhabitants, all strongly connected to nature and the local natural heritage, the newly built center KSEVT has brought imbalance and a considerable change in their everyday life of the community given that the building brings up to 25.000 visitors per year.

AAVS has visited the site in 2014, 2015, and 2016 to mediate and find ways for creating bonds and relationships between KSVET and the community of Vitanje. Encouraging, on the one hand, the participants and residence researchers at KSVET to experience and extensively learn about ways of existence in the social and physical context of Vitanje, and on the other hand engaging with the community of Vitanje to take advantage of the new situation without losing touch with their local heritage.

With the aim of investigating and improving possible alternative ways of avoiding devastating forms of tourism, AAnanotourism is implementing critical thinking into architecture and design to better engage in locally-scaled, sustainable, and accountable “guesting”?

In line with this proposal for “guesting” brought about by AAnanotourism, Mirela Baciak, curator at steirischer herbst festival, contributed to this discussion the concept of 𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘱𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 as an alternative to the practices of mass tourism and we asked: “Can art visitors also become guests in that they are not careless spectators and tourists, but reciprocate in the act of care provided by the host and its larger environment?

Baciak has been researching conditions of hospitality in curatorial contexts in the past years. She proposes this fascinating take on hospitality as a way to counter conventional understandings of the art visitor and institutions’ own relationship with them.

“Hospitality is most commonly understood through its spatial dimension as a situation in which someone enters another person's space, which he or she defines as its own—most of us first experience hospitality within the realm of our own home. However, interactions that take place under hospitality may go beyond an individual's private life into spheres of social and political organization, such as institutions or even states. From the perspective of an individual, hospitality is about one's ethical relation to a stranger; the act of hospitality poses an exercise in self-othering. In this sense, hospitality is about the ability to see the other in oneself and accepting the other as s/he/they/it is.

In the context of art and its institutions, hospitality as a guiding curatorial principle has to comply with bureaucratic protocols and the economic relations defined by contracts and invitations (even when 'everyone is invited'). Since an art institution is not a home, but a place by definition open to the public where crossing the threshold between what is mine and yours is not the same as when a stranger enters one's private space.

Despite these obstacles, hospitality might be how an art institution produces and manages its ethos, boundaries, openings, and identity. The sharing of physical space might be a prerequisite for the emergence of a mental space to practice hospitality as an ethical negotiation. If this could last longer than the limited duration of a usual public program, art institutions may one day transform into something entirely different.”

This idea of hospitality, as much as that of nanotourism, is a new framework for dealing with art tourists and even the broader idea of “community” that art institutions struggle so much to define. It proposes a thought-provoking possibility for thinking more carefully about a culture of care. Building on Baciak’s definition, hospitality entails recognizing the everone's well-being, comfort, safety, and joy. In that regard, we come back to Collective Rewilding's original question: Can art Institutions becomes sites for repair and care? Can art visitors also become house guests in that they are not careless spectators and tourists but reciprocate in the act of care provided by the host and its larger environment?