‘SUPERHOST’ – Group Show curated by Like A Little Disaster and PANE project

SUPERHOST: Collective project presented by Like A Little Disaster and PANE project.

Polignano a mare, Italy

4 August – 22 October, 2019

AGF HYDRA + Callum Leo Hughes + Keiken + Sophie Mars, Maya Ben David, Monia Ben Hamouda, Chiara Camoni, Daniela Corbascio, Stine Deja, Débora Delmar, Andreas Ervik, Michele Gabriele, Julie Grosche, HYPERCOMF + George Tigkas, Motoko Ishibashi, Natalia Karczewska, Botond Keresztesi, Andrea Kvas, Lucia Leuci, Valerio Nicolai, Ornaghi & Prestinari, Jaakko Pallasvuo + Anni Puolakka, Nuno Patrício, Clemen Parrocchetti, Andrew Rutherdale, Namsal Siedlecki, Micah Schippa, Mireille Tap, The Institute of Queer Ecology, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Wisrah Villefort.

Curated by Like A Little Disaster and PANE project
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“Ensemble”, video program curated by Julie Grosche, with:
Lola Gonzàlez, Julie Grosche – Florian Sumi – Emma Frost Nixon – Laura Gozlan – Edouard Le Boul’ch – Katy McCarthy – Christine Navin – Elizabeth Orr – Laura Porter – Deirdre Sargent – Lucas Seguy – Yoan Sorin – Marc Yearsley, Vijay Masharani, Katy McCarthy, Virginia Lee Montgomery, Chloé Rossetti, Yoan Sorin – Florian Sumi.
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Data and text contributions by: Murray Cox (Inside Airbnb), Cecilia Guida, Darren Marshall, Like A Little Disaster.

In a totally touristified ecosystem as the one in Polignano a Mare, ” SUPERHOST ” uses the strategy of camouflage as an ironic hypothesis of resistance.

” SUPERHOST ” is a real/fake Airbnb that manifests itself through an identity dissolved in a permanent chameleon-like process.
It emerges as a complex system of presentation strategies (of myself, of the neighbor) and of representation (of the self, of the others) that operate according to forces at play. These forces redefine, reorganize and re-explain the forms of the visible; they invite us to rethink the idea of the sign and of the production of the sign, the representation and the distortion of representation.

The interpretation of the environment of ” SUPERHOST ” has nothing to do with the concepts of truth and fiction. In its inside it is not necessary that the signs are true or false, but effective. What is worth is the credibility of the simulacrum offered to the other, the interactive moves and the regimes of belief and suspicion that are triggered.

The staging reiterates the maintenance of doubt, of a “duo-habere”, the failure to find a unique solution in the observation, keeping both extremes of the true/false cognitive couple alive.

The gaze, the interactive filter between truth and fiction is related to the theories of “sight seeing”, according to which the tourist experience (or the experience of the contemporary consumer tout court) would be profoundly altered due to the fact that it was pre-selected and pre-packaged, characterized by a series of social myths dependent on historical constructions aimed at a specific class, the wealthy one. Massified tourism industry is born from the alienation produced by capitalism in which even leisure and entertainment are shaped by the compulsive character of a society folded onto its smartphone, and organized travel becomes the emblem of the totalitarian nature of this system. The tourism industry is totally within the cultural one. What is purchased is a symbolic capital, but paradoxically the liberation from the world of industry takes place through the creation of another industry.

When tourism becomes a mass phenomenon, the element that normally necessary to the journey is the “sight”, the thing that must be seen, classified with one, two or three stars, according to its value. The tourist knows the object as sight, that is to say as a normalized element, worthy of being taken as an objective of an experience. The dominance of the sight, the translation into images of things and their normalization react on the things themselves, reducing them to the condition of a museum, a botanical garden, a zoo or an amusement park. Like in a shop window, the things to be seen endure a capital transformation: they are detached from their context, deprived of their networks, of the relationship with the conditions that have determined them and which can, itself, explain them.

SUPERHOST explores inauthenticity: in the sense that the traveling tourist would not see the world as it really is, but only the world that has been selected for him-her / or carefully prepared by the local communities themselves; he would not therefore see things, their natural or cultural essence, but only their image. The spatial articulation shaped by anxiety for the likely and the iconic, ultimately takes on signs of signs with which we are accustomed to representing the world, the elsewhere, the otherness.

Seduction takes the place of persuasion.

The sign is made to lie!