The tourist experience is by no means a passive, static or exclusively visual consumption of services and landscapes. Rather, it is experienced – in the Alps in particular – as an active, multi-sensory performance in dynamic cycles of movement. In this context, it incorporates the full landscape of experience, from arrival, through the hotel, the mountain and valley stations and the night-life to the visitor’s departure.
In order to reduce conflicts and misunderstandings between tourists, service providers and locals, their interaction is filtered and modulated via specific rituals and complex dramatic landscapes. In this way, outlets for self-representation but also private places to withdraw are assured for all those participating.
At the same time, the Tyrolean valleys with their distinct tourist infrastructure are suited to analyzing the influences of supraregional transformation processes on the local cultural landscape and architecture. For the landscapes of experience in the Tyrolean valleys did not emerge exclusively on the basis of ideas and concepts from local insiders, by any means; rather, they are coproductions that have been successively developed and differentiated by both travellers and those receiving the travellers.

Existential World in “Junkspace“

In this context, from the perspective of cultural and architectural criticism, many false developments are lamented. But this “touristification” has also contributed decisively to the radically accelerated “modernisation” of living and working spheres that not only enables survival in the high valleys but also means that today, know-how developed over the decades regarding setting up, operating and choreographing the experience landscapes may be successfully exported world-wide. The cost of this is an increase in signs and buildings, the “junkspaces” that have spread along the major lift systems into the skiing areas with reliable snow cover.
On the basis of selected actors’ routes (tourists, service providers and locals) through the whole valley, the sculptural landscape model reconstructs an alpine Tyrolean tourist stronghold and indicates the diversity of threshold rituals, small and big movements, and encounters in holiday stress and everyday service provision. Here, the brief sequences of events and actions are representative of many other actors, as well.

Social Nodal Point

The sculpture was set up for three years at a place where the paths of tourists, service providers and locals cross – at the edge of the final slope of the “Mayrhofner Ahornbergbahn”, directly beside the restaurant “Stoaner’s Bienen Häusl”. The network of paths provides an aesthetically attractive invitation to reflect on the roles adopted by the protagonists at the centre of the touristified mountain landscape.