What tourist attraction could possibly be outside the Patient Care Centre at the Royal Jubilee Hospital (RJH)? If you’re checking out Saskatoon-based artist David LaRiviere’s interactive app, you’ll see that the Anti Tourism Project is a very different kind of tourist attraction.
LaRiviere has spent his time as Open Space artist-in-residence talking to people around the city, hearing their stories (one of which involved RJH), and creating what he calls an anti-tourism-based guided audio experience that uses an interactive map and Anti-Tourism, a mobile app he created that he plans to make available through Google Play and iTunes. When people listen to his app, they hear people’s stories as they stand at the location where that story happened.
Using other people’s stories as the basis for his creative works presented some initial hurdles, says LaRiviere, adding that he spent a few sleepless nights thinking he had bitten off more than he could chew.
“It’s a bit of a sticky wicket,” he says. “I’ve written a statement of principles that begins with the issues around using other people’s experiences in your own work. I think it is a question for contemporary art. It’s an important question, because it has become fashionable in contemporary art through social practice and through relational aesthetics to work in this way.”
LaRiviere deals with this by focusing on the event in question rather than the person speaking about the event.
“That, for me, is very critical,” he says. “I don’t want it to be about that exploitation of certain persons.”
Focusing on the event also opens up the floor to many different interpretations of the experience, says LaRiviere.
“If I don’t know who the speaker is, then what I bring to the table in terms of my reading of it is as important as anything else,” he says.
LaRiviere acknowledges the slight irony of the project and says that tourism is a consumptive act.
“One question that comes up, even for me, is, ‘Who is this guy who comes into another place and puts on an anti-tourism project?’ People depend on tourism. It’s a part of their livelihood. One of the ways that I think about it is that I am actually a tourist,” says LaRiviere.
But LaRiviere questions things when he goes to a new place; the answers to those questions examine the nature of the consumption of tourism.
“I am speaking from the perspective of a tourist; when you’re a tourist, you consume place,” he says.
With his project, LaRiviere is examining how tourists look at the places they visit.
“For most tourists, the question that they ask of place is, ‘Show me your crown jewels. Give me your ideal narratives and ideal images,’” he says.
LaRiviere began by talking to people at the location their story took place at. Then he went back to his studio at Open Space, transcribed what he heard, editing it for clarity’s sake, then brought the recording back to the subject; they signed a consent form to say that it accurately conveyed their story. The stories then play through the app as listeners stand in the place the subject is talking about.
The anti-tourist doesn’t ask for what they normally see on a postcard; they ask for the day-to-day stories of people living in that place, says LaRiviere. The stories those people tell are not all flowers and daisies. In fact, some are very serious, while others are jovial.
“The anti-tourist asks for the real,” says LaRiviere.
Anti-Tourism Project
Until Saturday, August 25
Free, tour starts at Open Space
openspace.ca/programming/everysordiddetail