Phil Smith
Phil Smith is
an academic, writer and performer, who lives in South Devon, UK. For twenty
years he worked predominantly as a playwright in experimental, physical,
community and music theatres, during which time over one hundred of his plays
received professional productions. In 1997 his work took a sharp turn towards
working in non-theatre sites and this led to his interest in walking as both an
art in itself and as a means to making art and performance and everyday
political interventions in public spaces.
I have the pleasure to interview
Phil Smith again, this time advancing on from his theory and practice of Mythogeography – the art of ‘walking sideways’ – as an opportunity to learn about Counter Tourism, the subject of
Phil’s new project that includes micro-movies, online presence, and two new
publications: a pocketbook and a handbook for everyday tourists.
MM Which are the basic differences between Mythogeography’s
walks and the ones for Counter Tourism?
PS They are inspired by the same
ideas – those that come from the ‘drift’ or dérive – but where Mythogeography’s
walks (or at least their intentions) are unbounded, Counter Tourism takes the
boundings and prescriptions of heritage tourism as its object. Where Counter
Tourism’s visits step to the side or go off at tangents, they do so in order to
later loop back to the discourse of heritage tourism, in order to destabilize
or re-frame or vivify that discourse.
MM If we don’t feel nostalgia is that a problem? How does Counter
Tourism work in a country which we don’t know anything about?
PS In a way, such a visit, knowing
nothing, is already Counter Touristic. For heritage sites are very often
presented on the basis of invisible, unspoken but mutually understood
narratives. For example, in English country houses the lives of the uniformed
staff are often remembered and re-presented, but the non-uniformed staff (labourers, gardeners) are not. The
recognition of uniformed servants is regarded as a democratic innovation, but
it contains its own discrimination. So, actually preserving one’s lack of
knowledge or feeling might be a good tactic – you will very quickly begin to
feel the meaning-making machines get to work on you and that sensation might
illuminate the nature of the site and the nature of ideological production in
it.
MM Considering the attendance of British people to the trips of
Counter Tourism, what do you propose for a different culture, in other words is
there a pattern to follow or you’d change the strategy in another country?
PS When as a member of Wrights
& Sites I was part of publishing ‘An Exeter Mis-Guide’ we assumed that the
book would be mostly used in the city it as written about, yet it has been used
in many different countries – France, USA, India, Australia, and so on – as a
tool for exploration. Rather than me trying to anticipate how Counter Tourism
might be adapted for different countries I would rather leave that to people to
discover in their own improvised visits. At one point I write “if the guards
are armed” – there are no armed guards at UK heritage sites, so I am signaling
my awareness that conditions for visits will vary from country to country and
region to region.
MM Your research panel members come from a wide range of
working backgrounds. What’s your experience working with both professional artists
and also people with a background not related to arts and architecture?
PS Well, the whole basis of
Mythogeography is the idea of multiplicity so it was a joy to have so many
insights and perspectives. What the panel members brought were insights and
attitudes that disrupted many of my assumptions. Sometimes they de-composed
what I was thinking and doing, at other times their ideas and mine were
synthesized or fell into mutual orbits. It worked differently with different
people, but almost always adding to the multiplicity.
MM Why do you include popular songs and some informal
disguises, like hats? Is it a kind of postdramatic theatre?
PS There
is an inspiration for Counter Tourism in postdramatic theatre – yes,
definitely. The performance walks from which Counter Tourism developed might be
characterized in the way that that Hans-Thies Lehmann characterizes the
postdramatic: ‘disintegration,
dismantling and deconstruction’ , ‘de-hierarchization of theatrical means’ ,
and an ‘experience of simultaneity’
sited on a plane of synchronicity and myth: ‘not a story read from...
beginning to end, but a thing held full in-view the whole time... a landscape’.
Songs and disguises are for using sparingly – there is a danger that Counter
Touristic visits can flip over into showing off and exhibitionism. But in one
of the films - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM7FZkd1Qaw
– I do sing, but I think I’m probably trying
everybody’s patience with this moment of self-indulgence! So hats and songs
maybe, but very sparingly!
MM Does everybody participate in the performances or maybe you
found reluctant ones among professionals?
PS When a visit is explicitly a
performance – like a mis-guided tour – then almost everyone will be prepared,
if asked, to take some active role or part – modeling ghosts or holding a rope
for me to ‘dangle’ from. I never set out to make people feel uncomfortable or
self-conscious, I always aim to make people feel comfortable and secure and
then challenge them to step a little way out of their comfort zone for the
purposes of the collective event. Using the Counter Tourism tactics people can
choose how performance-like or how discreet they want to be.
MM I was surprised to see that in GeoQuest video old people are
participating, also kids and adults. Is there any different approach for the
eldest?
PS Well, these were older people in
‘sheltered housing’ so the visit of the GeoQuest there had to be to them in
their homes rather than taking them to the site – so we took rocks and sand to
them rather than them visiting the cliffs and beaches. But no, apart from being
sensitive to our impact – the arrival of three men in strange costumes could be
disturbing for very elderly people if too noisy and boisterous – we treated
older people in the same way and with the same intentions as everyone else.
MM You say there are variations and re assemblages of what tourists
see based on their own experiences of life. Is it valid to manipulate them to
find the multiplicity of points of view?
PS I hope that Counter Tourism is
an offer rather than a manipulation. It requires the tourist to make a leap
that only they can make – one can offer the different viewpoints, but if a
visitor wants to stick to a homogenized narrative of the site then they will be
able to ‘pull the shutters down’.
MM In GeoQuest video, people are making sound with stones,
while the leader is playing a song related to geology, also in another scene,
people are using pink glasses. Is it part of the exorcism of familiar forms of
heritage?
PS Yes, I think “exorcism” is a very
good word to use – heritage (in this case a geological one) is often seen as a
view through “rosy coloured spectacles” (a nostalgic’ overly sunny view of the
past that confirms our own prejudices) and using the glasses forefronts and
challenges that tendency and then seeks to bend it to a new kind of impact. The
fundamental tactical-principle of counter-tourism is to exorcize or hollow-out
existing ways of visiting sites and then re-animate those ways in exorbitant
and excessive ways (either as spectral versions or highly coloured, comic or
emotional versions of themselves).
MM On the other hand you show the importance of signs on the
monuments’ walls - what’s the purpose of it, wouldn’t it reinforce the idea of
heritage?
PS I try to encourage people to
‘over-interpret’ the signs – rather than as simple narratives of the heritage we
can (half-seriously) read them as esoteric crypto-messages or discover double
meanings or you tell ourselves tales about how they unintentionally reveal the
secrets of the site.
MM Is it allowed to take pictures, if they are a static
representation of reality, not in the spirit of Counter Tourism?
PS O yes, even without a stills
camera or a video camera we see through those lenses and frames all the time –
just as many urban nineteenth century people might have seen the landscape as
if framed like a painting. So I suggest that we use those internal frames
knowingly – and photography can help – as well as being a means to disseminate
counter-touristic ironies and opportunities to others.
MM Based on the film of ‘Mythogeography’ at the Royal William
Victualling Yard, are mythogeography’s walks exclusively for students?
PS Not at all! I wanted to make a
film of this walk and I wanted to take my students on the walk as part of their
course – so I was ‘killing two birds with one stone’ – my walks are almost
always open to the general public and I have no idea who will turn up – often
my subject matter is adult but my means are playful, so children can often get
involved in those means – for example, in my recent ‘Spaces’ walk in Weymouth I
referenced the murders of a local serial killer and dragged around a bath (he
drowned his victims) – the children loved the way that the water in the bath
bounced around as I dragged it over the cobblestones (something I had drawn
everyone’s attention to as a useful means – the break up and reforming of the
site’s reflection - to re-interpreting the site).
MM In the overall context of Counter-Tourism, what was the
significance of your “water walk?”
PS Water Walk was a mis-guided tour
around an area of industrial heritage and former quayside in Exeter during
which we tried out some innovative ideas for a tour that came to have a bearing
on the devising of Counter Tourism – myself and the other guide began by
explaining that we were going to relinquish most of the roles of guides, we
told the audience all the history we were not going to tell them about on the
tour, we enacted all the pointing we would not be doing and we took off our
guides’ jackets – we then led the tour mostly in silence enacting various
secular rituals using water (crucial to the former industrial processes of
tanning, cloth manufacture, driving the water mills, and so on) – we ‘exorcised’
the tour and then resurrected its tactics in excessive ways. The responses of
participants were qualitatively different from other tours – not only did they
describe the multiple meanings of the sites appearing, but they became
self-consciously aware of how they were constructing a multiplicitous
heritage-consciousness while in the act of actually constructing it in their
own minds - this quality I came to attribute to this tour’s accessing of
‘chorastic’ qualities in the site - a space somewhere between being and
becoming, temporarily resistant to obligations of exchange and commerce, a
temporary evasion of identities and hierarchy, a potential space of
transformation, a transitory space that a particular kind of performance might
be able to provoke and sustain for a while. From this walk I took the idea of
the double movement (exorcism and excess) to which Counter Tourism subjects the
ordinary tactics of a tourist visit, the idea that the guide should step back
and let the participants be the driving force, and that the driving aim should
be access to the ‘chora’ of a site rather than the performance intervention in
it.
MM Is it helpful for your objectives to see the landscape
indirectly, for example through the many reflections on the water, or through
lenses, or to imagine the landscape through the sky?
PS Yes – frames and mirrors – I am
always using them and advocate them – they allow us to become aware of the
internalized frames, mirrors and representations that we use and make.
MM In Counter Tourism, can the human body have a direct
approach to Nature? I was just imagining myself laying on the grass, listening
to the sounds of Nature and in this way recreate the landscape….
PS Why not? Yes, sometimes there is
a moment to drop all the clever tactics and go for a direct sensual immersion –
but without any romantic illusions – there will be all the same ideological
framings at play even in this sensual act as in, say, an intellectual inquiry.
MM This question was inspired by thinking of the movie directed
by Andrei Tarkovsky, “Stalker” ; I suppose you find some relations between
Stalker and Counter Tourism?
PS To some extent, yes, because
‘Stalker’ is about a kind of pilgrimage which is partly ordeal – and both those
qualities can be introduced into the touristic visit with subversive or
disruptive effects. And, of course, pilgrimage and tourism have always been
close. I like to use anachronisms knowingly – to disrupt ideas of ‘progress’
and ‘modernity’.
MM What do you suggest for those tourists in the shopping malls
who are missing the “counter tourism” or even the conventional tourism?
PS I would say – do the counter
tourism in the malls. One of my tactics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGAQTJAKSAA is to walk a mall
or supermarket as a zombie, treating the mall as the museum of a
post-apocalyptic society. In the Handbook I move on to discuss how all spaces
are heritage spaces – but some have a gate and a ticket office and some do not.
MM Where is Counter Tourism going?
PS I hope that it will be seized
upon as a pleasure by as many everyday tourists as possible – firstly as a
means for enjoyment, but one that will change the nature of heritage from a
looking backwards (whether serious and analytical or nostalgic and
chauvinistic) to what others have called ‘anticipatory history’ – a use of the
past for making the best futures.
MM Thank you so much Phil!
Above, three shots from the video Mythogeography at the Royal William Victualling Yard
