8:00pm
Tourism, one of the key sectors in our contemporary economy, is the industry that has been hit harder than any other by the current Covid-19 pandemic, with movements and flows around the world suddenly drying up. Our cities have suddenly found themselves empty after a growing number of houses have ended up on the short-let market and traders have specialised in offering services for tourists in recent years. Stage-set cities and historic centres turned into museums, stolen from their inhabitants and sacrificed on the altar of "enhancement", are some of the costs of an extractive economic model totally dependent on demand from abroad. In short, tourism is quite other than merely a harmless mass practice. It is a development model and an ideology, a contemporary form of "interior colonialism" against which populations and associations in many cities of the world are putting up increasingly strong resistance.
Sarah Gainsforth is an independent researcher and free-lance journalist. She has written for DinamoPress, Il Manifesto, L’Espresso, Internazionale, FanPage and Roma Today and is the author of di Airbnb città merce, Storie di resistenza alla gentrificazione digitale (Derive Approdi, 2019).
Giacomo-Maria Salerno is a researcher who trained in philosophy and urban studies; he studies cities, tourism and social movements, and is the author of Per una critica dell’economia turistica. Venezia tra museificazione e mercificazione (Quodlibet 2020).
The exhibition is part of the new cultural palimpsest of Roma Capitale Romarama
