Cagliari, Italy
Mission Title: Festarch
Mission By: Nico Kläber, José Pfister
Mission Finished on Date: 30-05-2008
SCRIPT
- Visit Festarch.
- Capture the festival atmosphere on tape and the seaside location. Highlight signs of tourism and any excesses of it.
- Look for the conferences most relating to the region's future expectations and projects dealing with tourism.
- Compare a sober, official speech attitude to Toscani's, most likely more provocative and colorful.
- Check out the virtual tour installation at Sala Inarch and talk with the organizers who collected the material. What are the region's projects for an alternative approach to tourism?
TRAVEL BAG
- “Sardinia is not a dump!” video
- Italian comedian Dado about abusive villas
- Sardinian band Tazenda Myspace page
- A nuraghe postcard
ON THE BLOG
- This mission has also an entry on Check-in Architecture blog
Does planetary tourism start in your own home?
It's nice to know Paris is just 60 euros away, and a bare 500 separate you from New York. Even though this might make us feel at home in cities that are really thousands of kilometers away from where we live, we know we're just passing by. It's cozy for us, not so much for the people who live the dark side of tourism and see their cities squeezed to the bone by crowds of well-off, leisure hungry visitors. The masses invading the fanciest destinations often leave permanent environmental – and fiscal – damage after they go home. If they don't care, the officials need to decide how much to be a bitch for tourism.
If architecture means being responsible for the quality of collective life and not just the mere process of building, the Festarch festival in Cagliari might be of some use to Sardinia. The region is the most independent and isolated in Italy, yet a touristic one, with a coastline raped by the politicians' abusive villas and pillaged by the summertime hordes. This year's edition of Festarch is about “planetary tourism”, by which they probably mean world tourism. The meetings, taking place in the ex Manifatture Tabacchi, a former tobacco factory, will feature different personalities such as Rem Koolhaas, Vito Acconci, Oliviero Toscani and Rick Moody, ranging from architecture to art, photography and literature.
