Posts with tag Tourism

Maja’s day starts early, at around nine o’clock in the morning and continues until late evening. She walks up and down the beach, trying to sell her things. She is one of several vendours doing the beach-walk in Palolem, India, everyday. “Do you remember me?” is a common opening question. “Would you like to see my things?” and “Very cheap!” Everything is sold; pirate copies of movies and music, bracelets and necklaces, stickers, beach doties, do Henna, manicure, pedicure, pinapple and coconut and much more. Many, as Maja, come from Rajasthan and travel in the beginning of each season  on the three-day trainjourney to Goa where the tourists are. They stay 6-8 months away from family and friends to earn an income and then go back.

Tourism is the prime industry in Goa, handling, according to wikipedia, 12% of all tourist arrivals in India. In 2004, there were more than 2 million tourists reported to have visited Goa, 400.000 were from abroad. The goal of 2020 is, says today’s Goan issue of The Times of India, to improve infrastructure such as roads and carparks, but also to change focus from only sun and beaches to promote the local agriculture, food and culture. A necessary thing, if, as said in the article, Goa want to be able to compete with other tourist attractions in the world such as Thailand and Malaysia. But with tourism travels problems such as drugs and prostitution, and worries are put forward that a whole genereation of Goan youngsters are lost in drug trafficking.

The pros and cons of tourism has been put forward in the local papers the last two weeks, very much triggered of a story of a young Russian girl being raped in Goa by a policeman. The story was lifted in the papers with the headline: “Is Goa safe for tourists?”. Today’s paper pose a retoric question: “But are Goans safe from tourism?”

New job opportunities are created and formed. The old one changes. The young man at the bar in Palolem used to as a kid run around an almost empty beach, where the only industry was fishermen. Now he works at one of the popluar hang-outs at the beach. And Maja, 37 years old with most of her family left in Jaipur, Rajasthan, has during the past five years done the journey to reach the tourists and business opportunity. How many foreign workers that reach Goa each season to work is hard to find an exact figure of.

How do deal with tourism is a delicate question. An interesting reflection of African cultural production and what attracts the global cultural entrepreneurs is written by Francis B Nyamjoh, Head of Publications and Dissemination in Sengegal, in “Cultures and Globalization: The Cultural Economy”. Somehow relevant in Goa.

”China!” The representative from the local business sector answers the question with one single word. In the North Italian town Biella, textile has been the major business since 13th century. In the beginning of 19th century they imported technical skills and knowledge from Manchester. Along the rivers in the bottom of the steep valleys manufacturing of textile was industrialised.

But Biella can no longer escape the globalised economy and its undercurrents. China is taking over. In less than ten years, thousands of jobs have disappeared. Twenty-five thousands are still left. A short-time visitor gets the feeling of travelling through a landscape of industrial heritage.

As in so many places in Europe, the authorities are putting their hopes to the cultural and creative sector. Art, creativity and tourism will save the local area. The listeners of today’s seminar are a mixture of business economists, philosophers and artists that take part in the intellectual experiment ”Nurope, the Nomadic University”. One of the initiators is the Italian organisation Cittadellarte.

Cittadellarte is the work of the artist Michelangelo Pistoletto. He bought an old spinning mill in Biella in the beginning of the 1990s. With a fixed purpose he has restored, built and organised what seems very close to a dream of a modern renaissance workshop. This is meant to be a place for reflection, a laboratory for new thoughts that needs to be formed and formulated if our planet is to survive. Pistolettos thoughts of art have been described as a-modern. In his vision of societal changes, art plays the main part.

In the ears of a sceptical Northerner, it sounds a bit bombastic. But if you have been forced to take part of the discussions on culture and business that at the moment is taking place at most parts of the country – and it’s discussed in many places; artistic universities and unemployment offices, at endless seminars and conferences – Pistolettos self-evident belief in the value of art for arts sake is refreshing. It’s far from the moralising undertones that you can find in the Swedish discussions. Artists have difficulties in finding a viable way of living. So they have failed as small-scale businesses. Therefore they should be taught to become entrepreneurs.

Maybe it’s instead as Pistoletto is saying or as the anarchistic business economist Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, one of the initiators of Nurope, has argued in several books: The business sector has a lot to learn from the artists.

The article is written by David Karlsson and was published in the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter at February 13 2007. Find the original Swedish version in PDF here: artikel_dn_070213.pdf. Translation by Lotta Lekvall. Photo 1: Biella, Photo 2: inside Cittadellarte, Photo 3: Art piece by Mr Pistoletto inside Cittadellarte. www.nurope.eu and Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto.