During a two-month artist residency with the Open Space Arts Society, I undertook a series of interviews with a number of volunteer participants, all citizens of Victoria, BC. The solicitation for participation forwarded a concept of "anti-tourism," the relation of place that eschews romantic and totalizing accounts for gritty, fragmentary, perspectival pieces of the real. In the course of the residency, certain themes recurred, including (but not limited to) public displays of racism, hostility towards the homeless, and the devastating toll of the fentanyl crisis.
The attached video piece amounts to an artist statement for the project and a defense of the "anti-tourist" position. The dialogue takes up the Nietzschean thought experiment of the "Eternal Return," and thereby proposes that the visitor who affirms "every sordid detail" is one who can never "acquire" place, like a notch on a belt, and that the encounter is bound to be fragmentary.
