Intervention 2 :
Check
Cheap
Peak
Chick
In the survey for the documentary The Last Tourist by Canadian filmmaker Tyson Sadler, 30% of young people surveyed expressed they would never go
on holiday to destinations from where they could not post photos of themselves on Instagram.
During the six-years renovation of my apartment, when I was doing all kinds of masonry and restoration work myself, an acquaintance came over for
a beer, looked at my arms and asked, whether I was “at the articulation already”. To my puzzled look, he explained that he meant the fitness phase of
the workout which follows the pumping of the muscles. The only thing I could reply was: “Man, I’m at the scaffolding”.
In 2019, former Royal Marine Matthew Disney took a fitness machine (‘rowing machine’) up Mont Blanc to raise money for charity – and then left it just
below the summit, saying he didn’t have the strength to carry it. The local mayor, Jean-Marc Peillex, in anger at the mountain’s littering, wrote in an open
letter: “With a name like that [Disney], one would think he was in an amusement park”. The Marine replied that he had a high regard for nature and that he
was doing it “for a good reason”.
When once I suggested making a trip to Snežnik my friend told me that she was not going because she had been there before.
Business says: marketing the experience.
George Monbiot says: ecological boredom.
In his book Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding Monbiot shows how modern man’s loss of contact with the natural world,
with wilderness leads to ecological boredom.
To obscenity.
THE SCORE
The score was designed in a way to explore the blurred line between a real and a fake experience. Participants were offered 4 different “tourist packages”: a trekking to Peru, Nepal, Tanzania or Iran, where they could conquer 3 (up to 5.000 m) summits in just one day! … Congratulations – we confirmed 18 summits in their mountaineering booklets!
By offering sessions on a room/fitness bicycle, equipped with a computer where the participants could watch the videos of the chosen trekking (spiced with a bit of porn-perversion to raise the motivation), while being surrounded by real mountains, the Intervention aimed at capturing the contemporary insanity. Yet, it was already during the making process as our artistic team was collecting ideas, that we were greatly disappointed – for we soon realized that anything we come up with, somehow already exists, for real … and people seriously use it with no second thought.
Two years after the Intervention I visited again the area where we performed – and there it was, as the peak of the irony, a very similar “entertainment machine”, called PHOTOLANDIA, standing almost at the same spot. … I would sure like to conclude that my projects are prophetically inspiring. However, since my project was critically oriented towards such nonsense, I am not so sure, whether I am proud of such “prophecies”, due to which tourists can now regularly take a photo of themselves with a fake picture of the mountains in the background (while real mountains are THERE, rising up just a kilometer away, opposite to the machine) … It seems no longer possible for an artist to be more creatively stupid than the world already is. No imagination reaches far enough – you just can’t win this race.
Concept of the project: Radharani Pernarčič
Co-authors of the intervention & performers: Tomaž Lapajne Dekleva, Radharani Pernarčič,
Sašo Rutar, Simon Svetlik
Technical support: Matija Omerzu
Thanks to: Cirkulacija2
The project was supported by the City of Ljubljana
