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The Tourist

Introduction

My first experiences as a tourist were when I was a child, going on holiday to the south coast of England or travelling around my own mind in a world of my invention. In more recent years, I've become a 'dark tourist,' travelling to sites of trauma, to the Death Camps of the Nazis and the battlefield sites of World War One. Using the 'tools' of the tourist; maps, postcards and snapshots, I want to explore the anonymous individuals at these sites who've long been lost to history; the victims of the camps and the dead of the battlefields. In particular, I want to look at where they came from and draw parallels with research into my own past, where such a question has revealed to me the almost impossible complexity and miraculousness of every individual being.

As a child, I made maps of worlds which I invented (see below) and it's with maps such as these that this project begins.

This world was created from what I perceived to be the best bits of the natural world. I was very much into the idea of unspoilt countryside and part of my interest in history at that time stemmed from a desire to 'see' the world as it was before the age of the industrial revolution (which was where my interest in history seemed to end). From great events in history books I 'read between the lines' and ventured within my imagination, into the unspoilt landscapes of the world. In my invented world, there were mountains, lakes, great plains and vast swathes of virgin forest.

Although this is a map of an invented world, it's no less a map of myself and in a sense, from my perspective today, a map of my past. Looking at my family tree research and visualising that tree as a map, I could see similarities between my family tree and the map above.

Both are 'maps' of the past.
Both are 'maps' of an individual.
Both contain places I have never been to and will never be able to see.*

*Of course I can visit the places from which my ancestors came; my point here is that those places will be very different compared to when they knew them; in some respects they are in fact, different places altogether.

With these similarities in mind I thought about marrying my distant past (my ancestry) with this idea of creating maps. The family tree, is a map of the past along with a route through that past - a route one has to follow in order to end up with me. I cannot of course show the routes that all my ancestors took through life, but by taking the childhood map which is itself unique (as every individual is) and replacing the places with those in which my ancestors lived or spent time, I felt I'd come up with a good compromise.

Furthermore, the invented world is a fiction and the past can only be known to us in the present through the fiction of history, whether through reading, through talking, in pictures or maps. Also, I've come to see my family history (and thereby myself) as not so much a product of relationships, but of places. I am, just as we all are, as much a product of places as we are of people. Of course in reality, we cannot separate the two and it would be more accurate to say (if indeed seemingly obvious) that we are products of people in places.

This idea of being a product of place is key to this project. I have over the last two years travelled to various sites associated with trauma; Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Majdanek, Natzweiler-Struthof, Ypres and Verdun. And as I wrote for my exhibition, Mine the Mountain, we often see the victims of these places as having always been that - victims; millions of people, whose individuality was erased through genocide and war are remembered only as products of the terrible places in which they met their deaths. The dehumanization process of both genocide and war is 'rubber-stamped' so to speak, by this fact. In the case of Bełżec for example, 500,000 individuals are remembered as being 'products' of a single place (Bełżec) rather than the products of hundreds of places over time.

One of the main themes I have explored throughout my work over the last two years is the need for me, as a 'dark tourist', to remember the victims of these places as being indiviudals who lived as we live today. I have used a number of different methods to explore and articulate this point, but having looked at my old childhood map along with my family tree, I have decided to use maps, postcards and snapshots (the 'tools' of the tourist) to approach the subject from another angle.

Looking at where I have come from, as I have said, revealed to me the almost impossible complexity and miraculousness of every individual being; every single thing that everyone of our ancestors did, down to the second, had to be as it was for us to be born. Of course I cannot trace the ancestry of those who died in the camps or on the battlefield, but I can reclaim a little of their individuality by remembering that they are not a product of a single place (i.e. only a victim) but the product of untold numbers of places, or rather people in places.

As a tourist in these dark, sad places, I owe it to the victims to shed some light on their lives, and become a tourist in the landscapes of their lives, just as I am in my own.