June 18 tourist art?

From: cfront-admin@cfront.org [mailto:cfront-admin@cfront.org]On Behalf
Of paulinep@snafu.de
Sent: Monday, June 18, 2001 7:26 PM
To: cfront@cfront.org
Subject: [CFront] tourist art?

> >

hallo everybody!, by reading with much attention all your mails, to make the
workshop last longer and also as i miss the people there, and the working
atmosphere, i wanted to react to some questions the recent cf exchange raised
to me. i liked to read the mail of aleksandar very much and agree to lots of
points, also concerning the organisation of the cf. i am here now in varna, and
i just took a walk through the goldsand beach, this tourist resort where now
mostly german tourists (can) go, and saw it through the look of a friend of
varna. by seeing what actually in bulgaria the tourist culture is, i couldn't
help finding funny the proposition to define tourist art as what we need. Later
we were invited to an evening meal for tourists where gypsie music was played
and a gypsie atmosphere was created for one evening. this recalled me an other
exerpt from the communication front newspaper I just read. to make the
instabilities and constructions of the different cultural identities visible a
proposition would be, after the model of german news headlines, that berliners
turn to bavarians for one night and that, on the same model, tonight all
europeans are gypsies. i know i am taking this exerpt out of its context and
kind of falsifying the intentional meaning of it for my purpose right now, but
what i want to say about it is that i don't think we can talk about, or
approach different identities and cultures (the often used term "other" ) if
the own position is not marked, and if the different power relations are not
made visible. maybe growing up in a family where i could observe the
contradictions between eastern and a western cultural backgrounds makes me
quite sceptic to a proposition that a tourist look is like another tourist
look. the next morning i will be again a gypsie or a german and for the next
time probably aswell. or i can take a adriaairline plane with luka and look
with him down on the country, but with the perspective of somebody who has
looked out of the window of a swissair plane the last time. Aleksandar used the
word multiculturalism, and although i think i can understand what one can
positively relate to this word, for example for somebody living in germany it
it a word which has a bad taste. there multiculturalism is something which is
mostly wanted from germans and not from non-germans living there, because there
it means more something like assimilation than questioning the hegemonic german
cultural perpective. So what i think i am trying to say in this quite chaotic
lines is that i also think that the communication between people from so
different backgrounds was the strenght of cf, and such a great experience to
me, but I am interested a lot in communication in the differences &
contradictions. I suppose here it is an argumentation on terms and when we
explain what the different terms mean to us, we find that the idea was not so
different?
so far for some thoughts, the computer keeps crashing and it starts being
difficult to keep on writing,
best to everybody pauline