During my second visit to Casares I joined a walking group of local residents to explore the rural areas surrounding Casares and to discuss the questions of the School for Tourists.
Author Archives: emmasmith
School for Tourists: Hedge School Photos
School for Tourists Programme
Hedge School*
Casares
Organised as part of the project The School For Tourists by artist Emma Smith
Wednesday 17 October
4.30-7pm
Meeting Point: Centro d’Artisania, Calle Villa
The aim of the School for Tourists is to think through and pilot possibilities for a new form of tourism: one that is reciprocal, contributive and sustainable.
Hedge School is an event created by The School for Tourists to think through and practically test out ideas for a new model of tourism that is of benefit to the residents of Casares.
The Hedge School will ask the following questions:
– What could be gained by inverting the tourist expectation of being serviced by considering the notion that the tourist could be of resource to an area?
– How might the potential of the vast range of skills, interests and knowledge of visitors and residents that come into proximity through tourism be connected and contributed to a location?
– How can the experience / education / facilities available to the tourist also be of use and benefit to local residents?
These questions will be posed and thought out through a series of practical activities that will act as a platform for discussion.
The Hedge School is a mobile programme and will be hosted in a number of locations around Casares. The activities included in this event are as follows:
Summary of activities:
Introduction: artist talk
Skills workshop: learning local skills
Story telling street walk: mobile theatrical street performances
Wayfaring: getting lost together
Read-In: meeting with strangers and sharing language
Cooking Lesson: sharing knowledge of food
Knowledge Exchange: an opportunity for tourists to give back.
Details of Activities:
Artist Talk
An introductory talk by Artist Emma Smith on the problems of tourism, the need for new models and an outline of the days event.
Skills Workshop
A workshop to learn local skills connected to the land. This workshop tests out a format by which local residents can share and pass on skills that connect them to Casares while offering tourists a point of entry to engage physically with the knowledge of the area. In learning these skills together the model offers the potential for tourism to support local learning. During this session the group will be invited to think through other skills that might feed into a future model of this programme.
Language of the Land
A mobile story telling walk of the streets of Casares. Viewing Casares as an active living space rather than historic monument this walk includes stories of the streets recounted in Spanish and enacted by local actors. This session aims to create a format through which residents can recall and share their local histories and tourists can listen to and learn the phrases and expressions of these tales while understanding their content through the improvised enactments. While walking participants will also be invited to consider how we might re-map Casares by the verbs and actions that one does here as apposed to the nouns and names that frieze it in time.
Wayfaring
An opportunity to get lost in Casares. Inviting a tourist participant to volunteer to lead the group in any direction they choose, this session will focus on what can be learnt by walking together, and the importance of being lost as a point to come together.
Read-In
Based on the method created by Annette Kraus in Holland, the group will go from house to house asking if someone will host us for our next session: a collective reading. The aim of this session is to test a format by which strangers can come together instantaneously without prior arrangment, utilizing this moment of the coming together of tourists and residents as a space to share language and learn from one another. Once the group has been invited into someone’s house or terrace the group will read together Act 2, Scene 2 of Brian Friel’s play Translations, working together to translate the work from English to Spanish and adapting it to the location of Casares.
Cooking Lesson
This session offers the opportunity to learn about local food and recipes from a resident of Casares. Like the skill sharing workshop the format offers the opportunity for local residents to share and pass on skills while tourists engage physically with the knowledge of Casares, encouraging an understanding of the connection between food and place.
Knowledge Exchange
This session offers the opportunity for the tourist to give back. Welcomed into a holiday home this session will offer a reciprocal cooking lesson offered by the artist as a visitor to Casares.
The day will close with a discussion on how ideas from the event may be taken forward.
* The Hedge School originated in Ireland as a format to bring people together in rural areas to share their oral knowledge. The idea of the format is to be mobile – to move with the knowledge, to connect with the place that you are in, and always to share.
School for Tourists: 17 October 2012
CLICK HERE FOR EVENT POSTER:
School for Tourists: Press Interview
Interview of Emma Smith by Yerba Magazine:
- What is the start of your project?
My project is called the ‘School for Tourists’. The School for Tourists was initiated during a one year residency at Grizedale Arts in the Lake Distict, UK, in 2011. Held at the Coniston Institute, a historic building created by John Ruskin in the 19th Century, for education, the arts and social cohesion, the School for Tourists examined existing tourism, as well as the historical and sociological impact of the tourist. Through a week long course that brought together local residents, workers, council members, conservationists, service industry professionals and tourists the project aimed to consider and propose new models of relationship that might offer more to host and guest, to pilot and test new forms of tourism that are reciprocal and contributive.
The School for Tourists II in Casares follows on as a development of this project. Having traced the history of tourism from the Grand Tour, to the package holiday, the modernist quest for authenticity to the post-modern quest for the in-authentic the School for Tourists II asks how we might shape a tourist model that begins in the muddy broken middle ground of relationship. What are the tactics for exchange and human relation that can result in benefit beyond the financial myth of tourist development?
- When you arrived in Casares, how have you organized your work?
My residency in Casares is divided into two parts, a research visit and a production visit. The first trip was to learn and understand more about the situation in Casares. Working with translator Rosario Loring, I set up a number of meetings with residents, workers and visitors in Casares, including people who were born there, Spanish nationals who are now living in Casares, British nationals who have emigrated there, tourist visitors and professional working in the tourist industry. Through these meetings I was able to get a better understanding of how tourism currently operates in Casares, the various attitudes towards tourism and the skills and knowledge of residents of the village.
- Did you know Casares before?
No this was my first time in Casares. That is why the research trip was important as part of my working process.
- What have you found out about Casares and the tourism there in your project?
Tourism in Casares is often in the form of day trippers. There is one hotel and a number of rentable houses within the village but most visitors go for the day. For some residents who do not want the village spoiled by too many visitors it is seen as a good think that the tourists don’t stay long, for others seeking to make a living from them it is seen as bad. The location of Casares plays a big part in the number of tourist visitors to the village. A large number of tourist visitors associate holidaying in the Costa del Sol area with beach holidays and it is for this reason that most people do not stay in Casares over night as most prefer to stay along the coast. What Casares has to offer as a historic rural village is much more similar to its neighboring villages in the mountains and not necessarily associated with the Costa del Sol.
The average number of visitors per year, over the last 5 years, is 4000 people. About 58% of these are Spanish, 28% British, 8% French, 4% German and 2% of other nationality.
- Do you think another tourism in Costa del Sol is possible?
Casares is at an exciting point in terms of thinking about tourist development. It has a lot to offer the tourist visitor, it has an existing tourist audience, but it has not yet reached the number of visitors found along the coast that has resulted in the engulfment and domination by tourist development. Casares is primarily lived in by Casareños – it is a place more than a destination. It has witnessed what has happened along the coast, both in terms of the impact of mass tourism but also the financial fall out as the market has collapsed. Casares is well positioned to learn from what has happened around it and to consider alternative and sustainable models.
- What is your best experience during this time in Casares?
During my research time I wanted to get an understanding of the skills particular to the residents of Casares which could be considered in a tourist model that looks at the exchange of knowledge. Everyone I met was extremely generous with their time but I was particularly touched by my meeting with Eieuteria, a resident of Casares, who is an expert at crochet. Visiting her at home to see her handwork, she demonstrated the very thing I am most keen to explore throughout the whole project – how to consider tourism from the starting point of personal relationship. Welcoming me into her home, repeatedly kissing me and making me feel more like a long lost family member than a stranger her kindness and warmth was extraordinary. She demonstrated the perfect example of what can be gained when people come together with mutual interest and friendship and treat each other with the love you would normally only afford to people you know. In this instance the tourist relationship is changed from visitor and service provider, beyond host and guest, to friendship, a healthier model and one which is reciprocal.
School for Tourists: on ‘Culture’
“It could be said, I suppose, that through the deployment of the concept of culture anthropology has created the problem of translation rather than solved it. Having divided the world, through an operation of inversion, we are now left with the pieces that have to be connected together again through translation. Would it not be preferable to move in the opposite direction, to recover the foundational continuity, and from that basis to challenge the hegemony of an alienating discourse? If so, then the concept of culture, as a key term of that discourse, will have to go.”
(Tim Ingold, The Art of Translation in a Continuous World. In G. Palsson (ed.) Beyond Boundaires: Understanding, Translation and Anthropological Discourse, pp.230).
School for Tourists: Learning Spanish
“Far from serving as a common currency for the exchange of otherwise private, mental representations, language celebrates an embodied knowledge of the world that is already shared thanks to people’s mutual involvement in the task of habitation. It is not, then, language per se that ensures the continuity of tradition. Rather it is the tradition of living in the land that ensures the continuity of language.”
(Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, pp.147)
Words learnt today:
buitre
cantera
via pecuaria
citricos
mirador
tagarninas
corcho
chaparro
castagño
algorroba
quejigo
herriza
sierra
peridotitas
carril
arroyo
ruta
School for Tourists: on Language
“I know a lot of British people here who take pride in not speaking Spanish”
(British immigrant to Casares)
“It was really important to us that we learn the language. We took lessons before we came.”
(British immigrant to Casares)
School for Tourists: on Tourists
“One of the good things about tourists in Casares is that they don’t stay. They come for a couple of hours, spend their money and go away.”
(Casareñio)
“One of the bad things about tourists in Casares is that the don’t stay. They come for a couple of hours, look around, don’t spend any money and leave.”
(Casareñio)
School for Tourists: on Sight Seeing
“At the heart of both […] corrosive grand narratives of modernity (the neo-Marxist and the neo-Weberian ones) is a temporality framed by loss. […] (In tourism) the Other is part of a premodern society belonging to a non-industrialised period where time is constructed and experienced differently from the time associated with modern society and its labour processes […]. Part of tourisms appeal, then, is that is sells a different kind of time – a slower pace of life – associated with non modern societies, which have not commodified their labour.”
(Alison Phipps and Gavin Jack, Tourism and Intercultural Exchange: Why Tourism Matters, pp.21)