Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore the relationship of the tower to person, through an Eiffel Tower key ring and will examine the fluid multiple narratives of the Tower through the materialization of experience,in relation to loss and longing, particularly when the souvenir is lost and refound.

Paper long abstract:

Making the Eiffel Tower Mine:

This paper explores the way in which memory defines the action of the souvenir, creating an enduring and complex connection between place, time and the possessor. It will explore the changing relationship between the souvenir, and the souvenir experience, with specific reference to the Eiffel Tower (Barthes,1997). Souvenirs enshrine, feeling, emotion, narrative, status, longing, loss, history, representation, stereotypes, cultural distortions (Appadurai, 1986) and have no use value (Baudrillard, 2005), however, the function of the narrative in the souvenir is so strong that the souvenir, without it, does not exist. This Narrative of Origins (Stewart, 2007), has the power to miniaturize monuments, capture cultural emblems, and to fix the past in the present.

Through using the tourist experience of the Eiffel Tower, this paper will examine the relationship of the tower to person, place and souvenir. Using an Eiffel Tower key ring it will examine the fluid multiple narratives of the Tower through the materialization of experience and narrative in relation to loss and longing and will discuss what happens when the souvenir is also lost. It will argue that the process of loss adds to the narrative of the object through a souvenir moment (Proust, 2006; Grennan, 2015), which could be described as a virtual platform of remembrance. It will also consider the nature of traces as the key ring, once lost, re locates itself in the narrative of the lost, until it is found.

Paper short abstract:

Purchase a souvenir, even more for handicrafts, is an act that refers to the lived experience of travel. This idea is based on relationship between subjective experience of the place and object destined to evoke it, as if it were a condensate of natural and cultural attractions of the place.

Paper long abstract:

Introduced in the sixteenth century, by the Wunderkammern, the practice of owning and setting up objects witnesses of travel, becomes common in the nineteenth century, thanks to massification of tourist mobility. In the following century, tourist attention spreads to the manifestations of folklore, and traditional crafts attracts travelers curiosity.

Purchase a souvenir, even more for handicrafts, is an act that refers to the lived experience of travel. This idea is based on relationship between subjective experience of the place and object destined to evoke it, which expresses the soul and the characteristics of its original context. It has a witness value of an idealized elsewhere and, at the same time, is inevitably charged with authenticity.

From point of view of those who produce a handicraft object to offer it to travellers, it is an expression of culture which contributes to the definition of historical and cultural profile of the community to which it belongs. From point of view of those who buy it, there is a desire to familiarize themselves with an immediately available local reality.

It is a complex process of building authenticity and locality production, involving multiple decision-making levels, and it is interesting how, in contemporary era of mass production, there is a such interest in handicrafts. It is a complex process of building authenticity and locality production involving multiple decision-making levels.

I report case study of Matera, European Capital of Culture 2019, and region of Catalonia with creation of a brand to promote authenticity of Catalan handicraft.

Paper short abstract:

This paper tracks the life of tourist ephemera in Belize as affective intensity: seductive lures that rub up against the transitory nature of a local world gone wild for tourism. Tracking the life of stuff, I gauge the impacts ephemera has as an emergent force of potentiality and panic in Belize.

Paper long abstract:

This paper tracks Belize ephemera in a manner that pays special attention to the generative forces and materializations of tourist clutter. Tourist encounters with stuff like postcards, advertising brochures, ticket stubs, and beer coasters evoke the sensations of the feverish and the transitory. This stuff is the mess and muddle of travel. It attracts instantly, flashing up as transient impact. It creates an affective surge as it pumps out potentials of desire, before it piles up in the corners of tourist attention, spent. It is excessive stuff that is also the stuff that once shouted its presence and function as it flashed by as dream world enticement, even as it ends up scattered across hotel rooms, washed up on beaches, or found at the bottom of suitcases like fossils emanating "radioactive" traces of life from another time and place. Using an "evening in paradise" when the Belize Jewels, a group of calendar boys, entertained tourists at a beach bar, this paper follows the flow of beer coasters as advertising material around which the shifting impulses of "the good life" grew vibrant as paradise desires. More generally, I am interested in the life of tourist ephemera in Belize as affective intensity: seductive lures that rub up against the transitory nature of a local world gone wild for tourism. Tracking the life of stuff, I gauge the impacts ephemera has as an emergent force of potentiality and panic that conjures the piled up dialectics of "profane illuminations" in Belize.