Workshop at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, LMU Munich, organised by Hanni Geiger

11-12 September 2024

From 11-12 September 2024, global dis:connect will welcome thinkers, curators and practitioners from art, design and architecture (history), craft (studies), environmental humanities and related disciplines to discuss the many ways in which aesthetic creations surrounding water-based tourism visually reflect, mediate and influence global dis:connections – past, present and future.

The workshop will concentrate on commercial and non-commercial visual artworks that, since the advent of modern tourism in the late 19th century, reflect on one of the most important resources of tourism: water, whether fresh or salty, in natural or artificial basins. When dealing with water, the sea and rain — referents of the Latin aqua — these works point to more than cultural exchange and preservation, the development of remote areas and economic growth spurred by water-based tourism. The pieces also relate to interruptions, invisibilities and absences, such as ecological devastation due to the over-exploitation of water for cleaning, irrigating golf courses and cooling tourism facilities; the glocal character of maritime hotel architecture; the rising sea level and the disappearance of many destinations, environments and cultures; beaches as sites of social inclusion and exclusion; labour migration; and the conflicts between local communities and national and global power structures.

Historical and contemporary visual works that treat water as a motif, material, image, idea, resource, a means, a route, a site, a scenery and an environment can illuminate the ubiquitous but overshadowed or undocumented interdependencies of global entanglements and disentanglements in tourism.The works reinterrogate the sensorial aspects of pleasure-based aesthetics and the connections it generates between consumers and their destinations with regard to dis:connectivities. Learning about aquatic complexities visually means fostering alternative, non-hegemonic approaches to globalisation research from the perspectives of the humanities and the arts.