Paper long abstract:

Since 1999/2000 when private German job agencies, in collaboration with the Austrian employment services centre, began an aggressive campaign in Germany's new federal states to recruit personnel for the winter season in Austria, more and more Germans are rushing to the Alps: no longer as holiday-makers but as seasonal personnel, working where other people go on vacation.

For this project a fictitious shrinking city in eastern Germany – a source region of tourists as well as seasonal labour – and a real booming major tourist centre in the mountains of the Tyrol are contrasted associatively with one another like vessels that alternately empty and fill.

The project is based on interviews with people looking for work, employment agencies and employers in eastern Germany and the Tyrol. For our projections, their real micro-political visions were temporally and spatially compressed and exaggerated to the point where they culminated in an optimistic outlook on the range of available personal options: the transfer of cultural know-how, capital accumulated during seasonal work, social skills and the use of the trans-national social networks that emerge from tourism's subcultures are able to complement each other productively; as well as how people's heterogeneous experience of tourism can offer unexpected opportunities for self-empowerment…