War Tourist

After Sarajevo and México City, War Tourist now travels to the Suburbs of Paris.

War Tourist is a project initiated by Emanuel Licha in 2004. In cities which have been through a war recently, or which are known to be dangerous,
a professional tourist guide is hired and asked to organize a guided tour - which is filmed - of the worst destructions or the most dangerous zones of the city. These tours are then presented in a video format. 

The use of the figure of the tourist guide allows to confront two visions of a place: the indigenous vision and the foreigner’s vision. In the relationship between a guide and a tourist, these two visions meet the way a supplier agrees to his client’s needs. The guide shows the tourist what the latter wants to see: in the case of the war tourist, ruins and zones of chaos are visited, in answer to the voyeuristic attraction to human misery. The guide organizes a tour of his client’s phantasmed city, inventing an idealized version of reality, thus not reality itself. The tourist is condemned to stay outside the reality of the city and that of its inhabitants. 

In every city the guide speaks in English, and although he expresses himself in a very intelligible way, his speech is subtitled also in English as a way to emphasize the feeling of superiority of the tourist/spectator and underline the incurable otherness of the foreign guide. 

• War Tourist in Sarajevo (2004, 22 min) proposes a visit of post-war Sarajevo's ruins.

• War Tourist in México City (2005, 15 min) offers a visit of Mexico City's poor and reputedly dangerous periphery.

• War Tourist in the Suburbs of Paris (2007, 20 min) brings the visitor to the suburbs of Paris, where important riots took place in 2005. 

These three tours also exist in the format of a web project. The viewer can now decide where to go, as well as choose the order of the visit’s different stages. Other tours in other cities are to come soon. 

FEATURED THEME ON CITY SHARING

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