Cultivating rhizomes

Cultivating rhizomes – tourism from a new perspective  

The Icelandic Art Academy for the second time invited speakers to their conference Brain storming 15th to 16th May 2013. This time two sessions on tourism were held under the title cultivating rhizomes: tourism from a new perspective.

The director of the ITRC gave a talk entitled Landscape, experience and the tourism product, which was a continuation of a talk given at the annual Humanities conference at the University of Iceland in March. The session on tourism at that conference was entitled Iceland – Niceland – Disneyland: From ontology to tourism projects. The title of the talk presented there was about landscapes marketing value with a question mark. Therefrom Sloterdijk’s concept of foam emerged and secondly conceptualising tourism as cultivation, akin to the geothermal greenhouse cultivation so prevalent in Iceland.

What cultivating rhizomes thus refers to is how tourism can conceive of itself and its development differently than only in terms of growth in visitor numbers and revenue. Cultivating rhizomes draws attention to how tourism can enable and empower local communities, asking tourism stakeholders to consider in their development objectives what type of tourism can enable communities to harness their endogenous creativity and potential.  

The presentation text is here in Icelandic.

The presentation slides are here mostly compiled of quotes in English and figures.