Late Torments of Overtourism
Over-tourism in the Age of Over
Vasilis Papageorgiou, 18:00, 2025
Ceramic, steel
58 x 40 x 2 cm
Courtesy of Callirrhoë and the artist
Photo by Stathis Mamalakis
Tourism and art: a complex relationship
Theorists, scholars, and artists are now systematically examining the new condition of overtourism and exploring related issues and concepts, such as place, landscape, wandering, travel, hospitality, leisure, precarity, the souvenir, identity, the exotic, the Other, the relationship between North and South, and so on. The questions about the relationship between tourism and art are numerous. What is the role of art in tourism? What role could artistic creation and curatorial research play as practices of resistance to the unsustainable tourism of our age? Is a challenge through art possible at a time when art itself is a tourist product? What is the role of museums, institutions, and exhibitions? What issues are artists engaging with? This essay raises some of these questions and aims to outline the recent development of tourism in Greece, from the years of the Greek crisis to today, as well as to reflect on problems, mistaken practices, and possible solutions, considering the unbreakable interconnectedness between tourism, society, and economy.
Mediterranean countries, especially Italy and Greece, are closely linked to tourism, as they have been traditional travel destinations since the 17th century, with the aim of showcasing their cultural heritage, particularly that of classical antiquity and the Renaissance. The Grand Tour had a profound impact on the tourism industry, travel writing and literature, the visual arts, and architecture. In the 20th century, travel became associated with sun and sea, entertainment and holidays for the middle classes, while after the Second World War, tourism became associated with the globalised economy and developed rapidly and on a massive scale. Today, we are experiencing the new phenomenon of overtourism.
In the last few decades, curators, architects, major museums, and independent institutions have studied tourism in its various manifestations from the perspective of contemporary art production. We perceive that in the 21st century, tourism also emerges as an object of curatorial research and practice. I would mention two indicative examples at this stage. The blockbuster exhibition Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist’s Eye at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago in 2005, curated by Francesco Bonami, presented the work of 70 artists from 30 countries. The exhibition, as it declared, “considers art, history, and the social construction of places, spaces, and identities from the heightened perception of the tourist”.1 Its title suggested the influence of John Urry’s classic book The Tourist Gaze, which examined the central role of vision and visuality in contemporary culture, the place of the gaze in the tourism phenomenon and, more generally, the visualisation of the tourist experience.2
In Greece, of interest was the Tourism exhibition, held in 2017 as part of the “symptom project” by Apostolis Artinos and Kostas Christopoulos, a platform that organised group exhibitions of contemporary art at the former hospital of Amfissa. The curators, Elpida Karampa and Glykeria Stathopoulou, had invited Greek artists and architects to work on issues of tourism at a time when Greece – as we will discuss below – was an attractive destination through the exotic image of the economic crisis. The curators posed “obvious and latent issues connected with the idea and the history of tourism as part of a broader industry, of politics and economy, which extend to issues of the local and the global”.3 2017 was a landmark year regarding the rapid development of tourism in Greece.
Architects also engage in significant curatorial work on this issue, since tourism is inseparable from architecture. I would mention, as a characteristic example, the Greek pavilion at the 14th Architecture Biennale in Venice, entitled Tourism Landscapes: Remaking Greece, which investigated the role of tourism as a vehicle of constant modernisation of the country through the construction of structured tourist landscapes, such as archaeological sites and museums, hotels and resorts, traditional settlements, seaside facilities, etc.4
Given that today’s overtourism phenomenon is directly connected to contemporary sociopolitical issues and, in view of the current polycrisis, the need for a discussion of overtourism emerges as both urgent and necessary.
The anxiety of exaggeration and overtourism
We are undoubtedly living in the age of exaggeration, where it seems we do everything to extremes. An age characterised by acceleration and exhaustion, which erodes our psychological and physical limits. In the contemporary age of over, digital technology plays a decisive role, urging people to over-use and over-speed. We could easily speak of over-scrolling, over-texting, over-screen time, over-sharing, over-communication, over-information, which lead to over-activity, over-anxiety, over-consuming, and so on. As a result, we are increasingly experiencing social acceleration, burnout, and the tyranny of speed, while trying to find the space, in all of that, to squeeze in the new, urgent awareness of self-care. Our time feels like a rare luxury, consumed by urgent work, urgent notifications, and the relentless pace of more and faster. The uncontrollable capitalist model has managed to push all our behaviours to the limit. As the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has argued, the ceaseless pressure for speed is a structural feature of contemporary society, driven by economic demands: the need for constant development, greater productivity, and an obsessive pursuit of competitive advantage.5
Dimitra Kondylatou, In the shade of the season, 2021
Single-channel video, 22:57
Video still
Courtesy of the artist
The over-activity of the neoliberal age certainly has an impact on the biosphere, as well: extreme drought, extreme wildfires, extreme floods. Although we are aware of these catastrophic consequences, we have normalised a society of over-dependency, over-speed, over-consumption, and over-performance, justifying exaggeration and excess as natural and unavoidable. We have elevated progress and development into non-negotiable principles, and we submit to the expectations of efficiency, performance, speed, and profit. Something, somewhere, has gone wrong.
The international art community follows this trend in a battle of endurance: over-biennials, over-festivals, over-residencies, over-travelling, over-production, etc. In 2008, Boris Groys had pointed out that “above all, it is today’s artists and intellectuals that are spending most of their time in transit – rushing from one exhibition to the next, from one project to another, from one lecture to the next […] All active participants in today’s cultural world are now expected to offer their productive output to a global audience, to be prepared to be constantly on the move from one venue to the next.”6 By now, large-scale art events also promise alternative – often exotic – travel destinations, commonly turning artists and curators into tourists. The line, therefore, that divides tourism from a research trip for artists and curators is at times a very fine one indeed.
Overtourism develops within such a society of exaggeration and overdrive. By overtourism, we mean the influx of numerous visitors to a destination, overwhelming its capacity to manage them sustainably. Tourism and social acceleration are two inherent products of modernity. We could argue that social acceleration, in the broader context of modernity, has played a role in the appearance and development of contemporary tourism, since its forces permeate and transform tourist practices, leading to the alienation of the tourist experience. From 2000 to 2019, overtourism emerged as a distinct dynamic of tourist development.7
By the promise of profit and prosperity, primarily for the poorer regions of the planet, tourism has become a dominant force shaping the complex landscapes of neoliberal capitalism. The negative consequences of overtourism include overpopulation, environmental degradation and pollution, depletion of resources due to high consumption, overloading of infrastructures, loss of biodiversity and the extinction of rare species, a decrease of the residents’ quality of life, an increase of inequality and the displacement of locals, the loss of traditional knowledge and local techniques, cultural degradation, and a downgraded visitor experience. Overtourism is now recognised by the United Nations World Tourism Organization and affects many countries across the planet, including Greece.
In November 2022, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMΣT) organised a conversation on “De-Tourism”. Having just come out of a summer of tourist overpopulation and reckless tourist development, the Museum considered it critical to focus on the problem of overtourism, one of the heaviest of our age, which is organically connected to art, at least in its more disembedded aspects. Taking part in the discussion were the artist Dimitra Kondylatou, who has systematically engaged with the subject of tourism in her works, and Angelos Varvarousis, researcher and activist of political ecology, professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, while joining on the part of EMΣT were this author and Theophilos Tramboulis. During the discussion, the speakers considered whether we could apply methods and models of degrowth theories to the productive economy of tourism.
Touristification and the gentrification of Athens
There is an extensive recent bibliography regarding overtourism, its causes, and its consequences. For several decades now, researchers from around the world have warned of the damaging impact of the travel industry on the environment and local communities. Most social scientists find that overtourism is a result of many governments in Europe and America encouraging a shift towards touristification. That shift is a consequence of globalisation, which has promoted the ideals of nomadism, constant mobility, and multicultural experiences. Low-cost flights and the advent of digital platforms for short-term rentals led to an influx of tourism into the daily lives of the country’s residents and a reduction in the housing stock for permanent habitation.8 Our country’s main problem in this regard is that Greece’s new economic model is based almost entirely on tourism, and we are therefore dealing with a tourist monoculture. Today, overtourism seems irreversible, rendering any alternatives almost inconceivable. However, scientists stress the need to “disrupt the monocultural fantasies of tourism”.9
It is widely accepted that the 2020 pandemic was a turning point, marking the beginning of a new momentum for touristification in Greece. The advent of digital nomads over the lockdown was the beginning of a new age. Home rentals in Greece began attracting the interest of professionals who could choose to work remotely. Digital nomads came to Athens, initially subletting their homes in their countries of origin and renting others in Greece, thereby also earning additional financial benefits. Greece offered fiscal incentives and tax breaks to encourage digital nomads to come and live in our country.10
Panos Kokkinias, Vardia, 2006
Digital inkjet archive print, 120 x 160 cm
Courtesy of the artist
Alongside the influx of digital nomads and their settlement under the digital nomad visa, we also have programmes granting residency permits to non-European citizens through property investment in Greece – the so-called golden visa. The programme proved highly popular, and numerous permits were issued. Both factors (the arrival of digital nomads and the issuance of golden visas) played a critical role in the housing crisis the country is experiencing in major tourist destinations, as they drove up property prices and put pressure on the rental market. Among those who came to our country, either temporarily or on a more permanent basis, are professionals in the field of art.
Thus, touristification and gentrification grew exponentially, resulting in a radical transformation of the country’s landscape. Athens is changing, local culture is disappearing, the islands are inundated with people and face infrastructure problems, and all of this has a negative impact on residents and the local environment.
It has been argued, moreover, that in the long term, investment funds will not remain in Greece, and that all this touristification will have negative consequences on several levels. It is, in other words, a self-destructive process. The most crucial questions to be posed are the following: What is the cost of excessive tourist activity to the ecosystem and to the country’s residents? Is the balance favourable? Can the world endure the model of global over-activity in the age of polycrisis? How can the monoculture of tourism change?
Crisis tourism and documenta 14
Let’s remind ourselves that the recent interest in Greece began during the economic crisis in the 2010s and was termed crisis tourism. As mentioned by Giorgos Rakkas, “social submersion combined with political integration, protests, and conflicts with police, aside from the image of Athens, also came to be a tourist attraction”.11 Thus, Athens of the crisis and, generally, Greece of the economic adjustment programmes and the dramatic situation, which constantly found itself on the front pages of the international press, sparked renewed interest in our country. The crisis narrative ultimately became compelling. Crisis and touristification are not separate processes of urban restructuring that merely coincided in time.
It is no accident that the art world also turned its gaze upon Greece around that period and took an interest in what was happening in the land of crisis, or, to put it differently, in “learning from Athens”. Besides, documenta 14, one of the most important international contemporary art exhibitions, also took place in Athens as a symptom of that interest. Its art director, Adam Szymczyk, chose Athens precisely because of its economic, social, and cultural dilemmas, which reflected present-day Europe. The exhibition documenta 14 undertook the mission of decentralisation and decolonisation of the northwestern order, with the slogan “Learning from Athens”. It used the crisis both as a subject and an interpretive framework for the artworks it presented.
As indicated by the title of the article “When Crisis Becomes Form: Athens as a Paradigm”, by Theophilos Tramboulis and Yorgos Tzirtzilakis, the Greek crisis served as an opportunity and became an object of study for the international art community. The critical reaction to documenta 14 in Greece was considerable and, as the authors remind us in their article, “As early as 2015, Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek Minister of Finance[s], expressed his objection to d14 coming to Athens […], saying it ‘is like rich Americans taking a tour in a poor African country.’”12 Regardless of whether we agree with that statement, it is certain that documenta 14 played an important role in the influx of art professionals from the global North who arrived in Athens for the first time. The post-documenta 14 era saw a more international Athens, especially in the art world. For better or for worse, intentionally or otherwise, it certainly contributed to the change that came over the capital, to the unprecedented gentrification, creating the subsequent conditions of neocolonialism that we’re experiencing to the present day.
After the pandemic, and the role of contemporary art
From crisis tourism, we progressed, however, to the tourism of the post-COVID era. Immediately after the pandemic, it seemed that people needed to travel like never before. In 2022, Greece was the leading destination for international tourists. It was also in the lead, across its entire population, in housing costs. In addition, in 2022, the number of Greeks who could not go on holiday multiplied, mostly due to high prices and unprecedented crowding. As the Professor of political science, Stathis Kalyvas, explains in his much-discussed article “Greece without summer?”,13 mass tourism was transformed into VIP tourism, which excluded Greeks from taking summer holidays in their own country. Holidays become the privilege of the global and mostly the bourgeois elite.
Tourism is a complex field of politics that demands a radical strategic reorientation. There needs to be a new tourism model that respects the natural and residential environments and produces added value both to the economy and society. If no changes are made with political intent, the tourist landscape will not alter.
Could art play a role in the necessary resistance to overtourism? Historically, the production of art often responds to specific sociopolitical stimuli and serves to question the status quo and to resist pertinent societal issues. In a discussion of tourism, however, this seems difficult and oxymoronic, since art and its institutions are often part of the problem in multiple ways. As the Spanish curator and researcher Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga puts it, “Like tourism, contemporary art as it developed during the last half of the twentieth century promised experiences of discovery, encounter, and exchange among different cultures and contexts. […] Meaning making is the business at hand: narratives of self and other, conceptions of past and future, dreams of natural and cultural encounters, all generated through desire, anticipation, and memorabilia.”14 Beyond everything, however, that contemporary art promises to provide, we could easily also charge it with complicity in the ceaseless mobility (as Boris Groys wrote), in matters of gentrification and artwashing, in its indirect relationship with cultural tourism (which accounts today for a large percentage of tourism), in other words, that art itself is ultimately also a tourist product for consumption.
In our country, contemporary art seems to have also thoroughly infiltrated the islands of Greece, with numerous initiatives for art events, exhibitions, and artist residency programmes popping up each summer. Thus, the international art community has an additional reason to visit Greece over the summer months, combining holidays and tourism with work. It is not my intention to criticise these initiatives, many of which are important and have also managed to create institutions for contemporary art in other regions of Greece, in the absence of more public institutions, as well as to provide work for the precarious profession of independent curator. But I need to stress that art, especially when presented at an attractive destination, becomes a tourist product and is often advertised as a special tourist experience.15
I would, however, like to point out that it is one thing for actions to take place on the islands that give Greek curators the opportunity to articulate a curatorial discourse and to artists to create new works, but it is quite another when the aim of the project is to attract an international art crowd for yet another experience like the one described by Morandeira Arrizabalaga. All museums located at tourist destinations (some of them, in fact, managing to become the destination themselves, like in the case of Guggenheim Bilbao), including the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens – with the current desired extroversion – as well as all major international art events (such as documenta 14) participate to a degree in the touristification that is underway. Keeping that in mind, as self-awareness, it is, of course, important to stress that the scale of tourism resulting from contemporary art cannot be compared to those of deliberate political will: the increasingly larger flux to more and more regions of the country.
It is nevertheless interesting to point out that a growing number of contemporary Greek artists use their work to critically explore issues related to contemporary tourism and approach the issue from a variety of angles.
Issues of tourism through the work of contemporary artists in Greece
Even though this essay is not aimed at focusing on artistic intention in relation to issues of tourism, I would nonetheless mention certain Greek artists who engage with the subject, in order to present the breadth of themes they explore, which range from matters of gender identity, the invisible side of tourism, the transformation of the landscape, gentrification, the relationship between landscape and tourism, migratory and tourist flows, tourism and climate crisis, etc.
Dimitra Kondylatou is interested in the relationship between art, tourism, the economy, and everyday life, as well as in the practices of artist residencies and exchange. Her video, In the shade of the season, examines female labour in the commercialised environment of tourist accommodation. Further, it explores the intangible qualities of female workers in the tourism industry, such as hospitality, care, compassion, and generosity.
Doreida Xhogu, Mama Klorin, 2024
Single-channel video
Video still
Courtesy of the artist
We also encounter the issue of domestic work and the women employed in the tourist industry in Doreida Xhogu’s practice, hailing from Albania. Her work, Mama Klorin, originated in the artist’s need to process memories of herself and her mother as migrant cleaners. In the context of Mama Klorin, Xhogu invited women cleaners to a collective workshop in Skopelos, where they worked over the summer season and shared their stories. Companionship and the support that developed between them while they worked in the hotel’s rooms were transferred to the artist’s studio.
Photographers such as Panos Kokkinias have engaged with the landscape of tourism and the tourist site. With certain photographs from the Leave Your Myth in Greece and Landscapes series, Kokkinias explores issues such as the crisis and the destruction of the landscape, as well as familiar images of what we term ‘Greek summer’. In his work, Vardia, we see in the foreground a mountain of trash, while a group of carefree holidaymakers seem to be looking for access to the beach of a dry Cycladic island.
The Depression Era collective is an art group of photographers exploring the juxtaposition between migration and tourism. Their collective work, The Tourists, functions as a subversive tourism campaign and discusses, on the one hand, the wave of refugees and mass migrants from Asia and Africa to Europe and, on the other hand, the simultaneous growth of global tourism in the Mediterranean. As they note, “These are parallel, converging global events producing states of emergency, distress investment, collateral conflicts, and cultural patronage, at the same place, at the same time. The Tourist lives in a divided, burned-out, hyper-mediated public sphere.”16
The art practice of the Sphinxes group is mostly fuelled by the social and economic transformations taking place in present-day Greece. Their work focuses on the processes of transformation of a place in the context of late capitalism’s interventions. They have recently engaged through their works with the consequences of the golden visa and gentrification. The starting point of their work, Thin Red Line, was the fact that, in 2019, the Greek government decided to shut down all squats by sealing their entrances. The work consists of nine letter boxes placed by the artists over the concrete entrances of the squats. These locations were transferred onto a map of Athens, creating an alternative tourist map that depicts the gap left by the sealed squats with regard to political positions, social actions, collectivities, etc.
In his recent solo exhibition at the Salzburger Kunstverein, entitled Sunseekers or Dimming the Sun or (2024), Vasilis Papageorgiou reflects upon the vicious circle of work, leisure, and exhaustion, relating the depletion of the planet’s resources to human exhaustion and burnout. The exhibition shifts between two discussions: the iconic “sunseekers” of the tourist industry – those who seek warmth and chase the promise of endless pleasure under the sun – are juxtaposed with the idea of “dimming the sun”, which derives from the terminology of the climate crisis as a drastic measure for cooling the Earth.17 Papageorgiou’s research, which proposes a reflective approach to capitalist pleasure systems, engages with several of the issues I bring up in this essay.
Vasilis Papageorgiou, Sunbed V (double), 2024
Painted steel, video, screen, copper plated beach towel
178 x 120 x 85 cm
Installation view, Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg, 2024
Courtesy of UNA galleria, Callirrhoë, and the artist
Sustainable tourism, an unsustainable economic system, and de-tourism
In recent years, resistance movements have emerged in the world’s major tourist destinations, fighting against touristification as a process of displacement and exploitation of locals. As Varvarousis comments, their methods resemble those of movements against mining or large-scale industrial agriculture, as touristification is particularly damaging to the environment.18 The exhaustion of people and places has created the need for alternative approaches beyond the exploitative industry.
An increasing number of researchers analyse the cluster of problems in the travel sector, ranging from environmental degradation to uncontrollable gentrification and the subsequent disruption of local infrastructure, as well as a series of other socioeconomic inequalities. They talk about digital nomads, the golden visa, platform capitalism, the monoculture mentality, friendly islands, the tragedy of the commons, the environmental footprint, artwashing, and so on. As a result, an extensive terminology has developed around the different forms of alternative tourism, such as ecotourism, responsible tourism, slow tourism, or sustainable tourism.
But how feasible is sustainable tourism within the framework of an unsustainable economic system whose primary aim is unbridled development? The timely discussion of diverting of tourist flows from one place to another, with a view to managing and decongesting certain areas, is not a solution but simply shifts the problem. Recently, Kathimerini newspaper organised the conference Reimagine Tourism in Greece at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation in Athens, where professionals in the field and representatives from institutions discussed their proposals for the future of tourism. As mentioned in Kathimerini, “Improvement of infrastructures, management of visitor flows, and staff training are some of the immediate challenges”.19 A plan for the diversion of tourist flows, however, leads over time to even greater touristification. In the words of Kalyvas, “the construction, for example, of a contemporary airport on a Cycladic island may facilitate access to it, but multiplies visitors, and thus puts pressure on all the other infrastructures”.20
Furthermore, investment in quality, of which there is much talk, demands careful consideration.21 High quality means exclusive tourism and, subsequently, attracting wealthier clients aggravates certain problems and fails to address the structural issues inherent in tourist development. How fair and democratic for society is a tourism addressed to the few? In an age when temperatures are constantly rising and climate change is by now an undeniable fact, you would think that people living in Mediterranean countries such as Greece would need to spend more time closer by the sea. On the contrary, data indicates that Greeks are increasingly excluded from taking holidays at seaside destinations.
To the question of whether such a thing as alternative and sustainable tourism actually exists, the journalist and essayist Sarah Gainsforth responds that, in accordance with the researchers of tourist science, it does exist, at least in theory, but according to researchers in other sciences, it is not possible without radical change in the economic framework, a manifestation of which is tourism. Sustainable tourism would probably go the way of sustainable development, and that’s because development in its present form is not compatible with the needs of the biosphere. It is the same as claiming that we can resolve the climate crisis with greater green development. As Gainsforth writes, “the idea of sustainable development, i.e. economic development compatible with nature, ‘is an inherent contradiction’ within a system that kills nature in the name of profit”.22
Sphinxes, Τhe Τhin Red Line, 2019
Map showing the locations of mailboxes at blocked entrances to buildings that were occupied in central Athens
Green and sustainable agreements, therefore, do not address the problem, since they don’t recognise the causes of the climate crisis, the loss of biodiversity, and social problems. Nevertheless, the current economic system is fed by the exploitation of resources and constant mining. The tourist industry is yet another instrument of excessive capitalist development. What researchers in the tourism sector need to do at this stage is abandon the myth of ceaseless economic development and embrace the post-development concept of a fair future for all people and the environment.
Many researchers, philosophers, and economists present tangible arguments to challenge the myth of development, showing that increased production will not solve the problems of climate change, poverty, or inequality.23 And the reason is society’s obsession with development that speeds up social and ecological breakdown. Or, to put it another way, as the theorist and professor of political economy Massimo de Angelis has claimed, development and capitalist expansion threaten social and environmental reproduction. If the mentality of perpetual development doesn’t change, returning to a more sustainable society seems impossible. As the philosopher Kohei Saito also argues, rampant capitalism is often blamed for inequality and climate change, but ensuing appeals for sustainable development and green agreements are a dangerous compromise. Saito advocates degrowth and deceleration, which he understands as a slowing of economic activity through democratic reform of labour and production. On a practical level, he argues for the end of mass production and mass consumption and for prioritising meaningful labour over corporate profit.
Varvarousis, in the conversation around the issue of “De-Tourism” that I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, argued that de-tourism proposes an exodus from the monoculture of tourism, through a multidimensional economy and a multilayered, gradual, strategic uncoupling of tourism and mobility from the sole aim of economic growth. In that way, it serves as a distinct point of the greater demand for sustainable degrowth.24 Degrowth has emerged in the context of this global crisis and is connected to ideas and concepts such as de-acceleration, slowdown, more free time for leisure, less production and consumption, fewer working hours, reduced activities that damage the environment, and many other things that can’t be analysed here.25
The logic of over that I brought up at the beginning needs to change, not only in tourism but in society at large. We have normalised a society that depletes our energy and the planet’s resources. Can we, however, think of tourism in a different way and of an overdeveloped society slowing down? “Yes, we can prosper without development”, writes Giorgos Kallis, an economist of ecology and political ecologist, in his essay of the same title, where he explains the reasons that such a statement is valid.26 The supporters of degrowth challenge us to embrace a future of moderation and common prosperity, proving that deceleration is the key to true progress and social equality. I think we all know we need to slow down and reduce social metabolism, in an age when all activities and dominant trends move in the opposite direction. It is a fact, however, that these discussions take place between the intellectuals of our age and are excluded from the official public political discussion. If this discussion does not become more general, we will continue to live within the logic of over until the bitter end.
Depression Era posters for Τhe Tourists campaign, 2015-2019
Left based on a photograph by Marinos Tsagkarakis
Right based on a photograph by Giorgos Moutafis
Those of us working in the art sector have a duty to consider the role that art plays in tourism. In addition to adopting green production practices and measuring our environmental footprint – without doubting their significance – we need to reflect on the relationships between art and tourism, art and leisure, and the ideas and concepts we mentioned above. When it comes to contemporary art production, is more and faster ultimately better than less and slower? Might the latter equal greater awareness, assimilation, and connection to what we do, a space for genuine interaction, while the former anxiety, processing, loss of meaning, alienation, and a series of things that need to be consumed? By this, I’m not arguing for a return to a pre-modern past but for a different and more meaningful relationship with the world and life.
What I have tried to do here, beyond outlining the issues that have contributed to the overtourism we’re experiencing in Greece, is to create a conceptual context for reflecting on the interactions between tourism and acceleration, as well as to raise awareness on the need for de-acceleration. I’m well aware that it’s not at all easy, as a society, to unlearn things that we consider incontrovertible and think in such a direction, but what other choices do we have? As I often say, change will not come from art, but contemporary art could provide a space of critical reflection around the multifaceted issue of overtourism and contemporary social acceleration, in order to inspire and motivate more post-growth and care-full practices and with the ultimate aim of a more harmonious coexistence of mankind, place, and nature.
Let’s remember the lost virtues that Henry Miller conveyed when, in 1939, he visited Greece for the first time. Coming from a mechanised West, the author felt that our country at the time was a refuge from speed, productivity, stress, and mental exhaustion. Greece wasn’t a set but a character.
And what is it about Greece that makes you like it so much?” asked someone.
I smiled. “The light and the poverty,” I said.
“You’re a romantic,” said the man.
“Yes,” I said, “I am crazy enough to believe that the happiest man on earth is the man with the fewest needs. And I also believe that if you have light, such as you have here, all ugliness is obliterated. Since I’ve come to your country I know that light is holy: Greece is a holy land to me.”
[…]
“You can say that because you have sufficient…”
“I can say it because I’ve been poor all my life,” I retorted. […] “It isn’t money that sustains me – it’s the faith I have in myself, in my own powers.”27
And let us consider the seas we are swimming in today by reading an excerpt from the recent poem by the writer and philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Nuotate” [Swimming]:28
Swim, bathers of Europe,
In the calm waters of the Adriatic Sea,
Swim with your goose-shaped rings
And with your colourful mattresses
Among the waves that ripple the surface
Of the foul sea infested
With millions of dead fish
And a hundred thousand corpses
Of shipwrecked souls.
Swim, bathers of Europe,
In the troubled waters
Of the Greek sea from which a virgin was born.Swim without worries, you who have earned a holiday
You tattooed, qualified employees
Swim with your snorkels and fins
While the beach is swarming with tanned people
Authorised and insured
Against theft and other unexpected things
Corpses of refugees.
Kari Dahlgren, Kamilah Foreman, & Tricia Van Eck (Eds.), Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist’s Eye, exhibition catalogue, Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005, back cover.
Eirini Papadaki, “Foreword by the scientific editor of the Greek edition”, in John Urry & Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze, Athens: Pedio, 2004, p. ix [in Greek].
Elpida Karampa & Glykeria Stathopoulou (Eds.), Tourism, exhibition catalogue, Amfissa: The Symptom Project, 2017 [in Greek].
Yannis Aesopos (Ed.), Tourism Landscapes: Remaking Greece, Athens: Domes, 2015.
Rosa argues that we are living in a system structured by social acceleration and defines three interconnected dimensions of that acceleration: technological acceleration, the acceleration of social change, and the acceleration of the pace of living.
Boris Groys, “The City in the Age of Touristic Reproduction”, in Dahlgren et al. (Eds.), Universal Experience, op. cit., p. 32.
Angeliki Mitropoulou & Kostas Eleftheriou, “Overtourism: Conceptual Approaches and Structural Dimensions of a Contemporary Phenomenon”, in Angeliki Mitropoulou (Ed.), Tourism in Greece: Transformations, Resistance, and Prospects, Athens: ENA Institute for Alternative Policies, 2025, p. 89 [in Greek].
For a substantiated analysis, see Giorgos Rakkas’ recent book, Overtourism: Carefree Capitalism and the Social Crisis of the City, Athens: Patakis, 2025 [in Greek].
George Papam & David Bergé (Eds.), Islands After Tourism: Escaping the Monocultures of Leisure, Athens: Kyklada Press, 2023.
Greece is among the most popular destinations for three basic reasons: climate, cost of living, and quality of healthcare.
Rakkas, op. cit., p. 12.
Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga, “Tourism Apocalypse Now”, in Mirela Baciak (Ed.), Vasilis Papageorgiou: Sunseekers or Dimming the Sun or, Milan & Salzburg: Mousse Publishing & Salzburger Kunstverein, 2024, p. 37.
As the website of a Cycladic island characteristically states, “experience the island through an art project”.
Angelos Varvarousis, “Tourist Mining in the Aegean: Greek Tourism through the Lens of Global Urbanisation”, in Mitropoulou (Ed.), Tourism in Greece, op. cit., p. 171 [in Greek].
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said, “It is my ambition to make Greece the number one tourist destination in terms of quality”.
Sarah Gainsforth, Overtourism, Athens: Nefeli, 2025, p. 81 [in Greek].
Of interest is the recent book by economist Timothée Parrique, Slow Down or Die, in which he explains that GDP, the main macroeconomic measure of progress, disregards human welfare and the health of the environment, making it a dangerous guide for the future.
See also Angelos Varvarousis’ article: https://left.gr/news/apo-toyrismos-apo-ti-monokalliergeia-tis-xaplostras-stis-poikiles-morfes-tis-litis-afthonias [in Greek].
The chapter “Fridays off” in Giorgos Kallis’ book, In Defence of Degrowth, provides a substantiated and documented analysis of the issue.
I would also like to mention a tangible example. The four-day working week adopted by Iceland six years ago proved to have remarkable results: less stress, more fulfilment from work, more time for living, while productivity, rather than going down, was in fact even increased in certain areas.
Ibid.
Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi, New York: New Directions, 2010, p. 133.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Nuotate”, 28 July 2023, https://not.neroeditions.com/archive/nuotate/ [in Italian].
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daphne Vitali is a curator and writer from Athens and Rome, and is a curator at ΕΜΣΤ. She is mainly interested in artistic practices rooted in social, political, and ecological issues, and her curatorial practice has focused on research-based artistic practices and the historiographic turn in contemporary art as a means of investigating and interpreting the present. Among her curatioral projects and exhibitions are: Janis Rafa: We Betrayed the Horses, EMΣΤ; Bouchra Khalili: Lanternists and Typographers, EMΣT; Erica Scourti: Profiles of You, EMΣT; Alessandra Ferrini: Unsettling Genealogies, Museo Novecento, Florence; Unpacking My History, Quadriennale, Rome; When the Present is History, DEPO, Istanbul, and MOMus, Thessaloniki; Everything Is in a State of Change, Goethe-Institut, Athens; Directed by Desire, rongwrong, Amsterdam; Those Winged Words, Fondazione Giuliani, Roma; Expanded Ecologies, ΕΜΣΤ. She has published essays in international periodicals such as Kunstforum International, Mousse, NERO, Artpulse, has edited many exhibition catalogues, and authored for various publications. She has participated in talks, conferences, and curatorial programs at institutions such as ZETA Contemporary, Tirana; Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam; Eastern Balkans Institute for Art, Sofia; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Flanders Arts Institute, Brussels; Cluj Cultural Centre, Romania; ARCO Madrid; Artissima, Torino; Thessaloniki biennial, etc.