Anti-Tourism
Anti-Tourism is an affirmative method for interacting with place. It resists modes of engagement rooted in transaction, extraction, and consumption. As such, Anti-Tourism does not proceed by opposing tourism as a protest or counter-spectacle. Rather, it operates through a form of movement that suspends anticipation and refuses the payoff of a given destination. The work drifts. Through listening and learning, Anti-Tourism follows encounters rather than itineraries, remaining attentive to what unfolds rather than what is promised.
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Anti-Tourism is drawn to minor histories and to all that escapes capitalistic capture: unquantifiable lived experience, material traces, peripheral narratives, and the dynamic emergence of stories that permeate every surface of a place. These histories do not accumulate toward a total account, nor do they resolve into a coherent narrative. Interpersonally, paths cross and diverge; events take shape through chance encounters rather than design. What occurs is singular to the work, its time, its place, and its moment of reception—guided only by an experiment in presence. The destination is abolished in favour of whatever may come.
Attentive presence also entails an ethical dimension. As Anti-Tourism moves through place, it necessarily encounters Indigenous territories, colonial histories, and ongoing structures of dispossession. In these contexts, Anti-Tourism does not presume to represent, recover, or speak on behalf of others. Decolonization is approached in good faith, as an ongoing practice rather than a claim: through acts of listening before speaking, learning before framing, and resisting modes of transactional exchange, whether material, cultural, or symbolic. To be an ally in this sense is not to claim authority or proximity, but to remain accountable to the specificity of place and to the limits of one’s own position. Some stories are not available, just as some knowledge is not shareable. Presence here is not entitlement, but responsibility and respect.
All the while, tourism continues in the background. Capitalism persists in its operations of capture, quantifying and categorizing place in accordance with state power, corporate interest, and extractive logic. Minoritarian1 experience is continually subordinated to grand narratives that render lived reality legible only insofar as it can be managed, exchanged, or consumed. Anti-Tourism does not resolve this condition. It resists by being. It insists on the heterogeneous field of lived reality: a shared terrain of listening, learning, and defiant openness to what thrives beyond representation and evades capture.
1“Minoritarian” refers not to demographic minority but to modes of existence and expression that resist majoritarian capture. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, the minoritarian operates outside dominant structures regardless of numerical representation or class position. Where Marxist frameworks locate resistance in class struggle, the minoritarian emerges wherever lived experience refuses to be counted, quantified, or subordinated to grand narrative. It is the minor histories, the grass roots, the unscripted—that which persists in the margins not because it lacks power numerically, but because it operates according to different logics than those of state and capital.
The artist would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts and SK Arts for their generous support of the Anti Tourism project in all of its incarnations: #everysordiddetail in Victoria, Treaty Six: The Smooth and the Striated in Edmonton, and with future projects planned for 2022.
