The Tour of All Tours (presentation)

An overview of the Tour of All Tours, its principles, delivery and reception in Europe and Asia.

This presentation gives an overview of the performance project The Tour of All Tours, outlining some of the principles underlying it, and then looking at how it has been given and received in different locations in Europe and Asia. In contrast to the tourism industry that frames the tourist as a mobile consumer, I will explain how I take a broad idea of the tourist that includes artists, academics and workers who often travel for different reasons – often more similar than different to tourists in important ways. I will also mention how tourist aesthetics have increasingly permeated mainstream cultures to the extent that people are liable to adopt a tourist gaze without even travelling at all. As well as taking an extended view of who tourists are and what they do, I will also broaden the idea of what a tour is, so that I may consider it as a performance structure rather than a tourist industry product; in this way bringing in such things as political marches, pilgrimages and artist’s projects.

With this broad definition that stresses connections more than differences, I will look at the project and highlight the issue of mobility. As the project is a guided tour of guided tours, it necessarily deals with mobility and does so in two obvious way: it considers both the mobility of tourists and the mobility of tour formats, that is to say what and how visitors project onto locations, and how in turn the location makes itself know to visitors.

I will then consider the mobility of the project itself. I will compare and contrast the creation and reception of The Tour of All Tours in different locations, including Melbourne. I will attempt to show how, in choosing to spotlight the interaction of host and visitor as a site of performance, these works invariably become political. I will describe how each tour I have made so far has uncovered a set of themes specific to its location, which I was unable to fully predict prior to making the work. Indeed, it is usually the unintended meta-narratives that emerge as a result of taking tours that I am most interested in and which, I will argue, finally give the most revealing portrait of a place.

  • The Tour of All Tours, Performing Mobilities, 2015.

  • The Tour of All Tours, Performing Mobilities, 2015.

  • The Tour of All Tours, Performing Mobilities, 2015.

  • The Tour of All Tours, Performing Mobilities, 2015.

  • The Tour of All Tours, Performing Mobilities, 2015.