Eija Mäkivuoti

Another Faroes. The Unbearable Lightness of Giving a F**k (A Thousand Faroe Islands)

A Multi-Dimensional and Collaborative Art Project about the emerging mass tourism on the Faroe Islands

Made in Collaboration with a Group of Local People Keeping in Mind the Dimension of Socio-Cultural Sustainability.

#SuperNovaTourist #tulogaf #therealfaroeislands

Work 2:

The Yellow Raincoat (Marjun), 2017–2021

(A Series of Photographic Prints. Will be joint with textual / audio works by the local people in the photos.)

This photo stands alone. It is also a part of a series of photos made together with a group of local people where we investigate the emerging mass tourism on the Faroe Islands. It is a staged photo, made in dialogue and together with Marjun S. Svartafoss, during our walk around Tórshavn, Faroe Islands on a Friday afternoon in October 2017.

The idea is that the local person chooses a spot where they are photographed – a place or a setting to comment what is not shown in the representations made by the visiting adventure tourists, the Insta-famous travel and adventure photographers and other people coming to create narratives of the Faroese people and their lands. Places, settings or aspects these visitors ignore or do not choose to portray when they explore, discover and narrate the small island nation the Faroe Islands.

The Yellow Raincoats series studies phenomena within travel photography and mass tourism as well as the power of the social media as a shaper of world-views and narratives of the world. Foremost, it studies the emerging mass tourism on the Faroe Islands through collaborative storytelling, in dialogue with some local people. This series focuses on the study of the generic visual aesthetics, as well as behaviours, emerging in a vast amount of photos on the social media, foremost on Instagram. It is also an attempt to counter a one-sided imagery appearing to depict the Faroe Islands. An ever-growing mass of travel photographers arrive to portray the islands as a majestic and exotic place without almost any people, any contemporary architecture nor signs of contemporary life whatsoever. The cute villages are inhabited by some mysterious hobbit people.

The performative photos are made in collaboration with some local people. The person in the photograph is wearing a yellow raincoat, taking the place of the tourist in the photo – they are symbolically taking back the power to show what the visitors ignore or do not choose to portray when they explore and discover the small island nation in the midst of the Atlantic Ocean. The yellow rain coat is a stereotype, a generic aesthetics, you see the "Wanderers above the Sea of Fog" wearing, when they are gazing at the romanticised natural scenery, the landscapes, they have “explored”, “discovered”, “conquered”, “mounted” and collected as their photograph-trophies (Sontag, 1971) – or what we call them in our contemporary times, Instagram-shots. This is done over and over again, in the same locations. The locals comment on how they see their land depicted by the visiting adventure photographers, the commercial travel photographers, the Insta-famous – to show another Faroes – adding more dimensions to a portrayal of these lands. Marjun's locations are from our walk around Tórshavn, Urd's locations from a road trip we made in Oct 2017. Mariann's locations are from the village she lives in.

There has been a change within the past few years in how Faroe Islands are branded, marketed and narrated through visual imagery. The aim is to attract the adventure explorer traveller, the heroic travel photographer and the hipster, to “discover the undiscovered lands”, and the travellers do exactly that – portray the remote wilderness and the cute little villages with turf roof tops with some additional puffins and sheep here and there – no matter what, many times without any respect towards the locals nor their lands (now the respect has to be asked on Visit Faroe Islands’ posts). It seems tourism is also a behaviour. This behaviour I will study further in another artwork.

The travellers portray majestic and sublime landscape sceneries that can be further used in marketing the lands to an ever growing mass of contemporary explorers arriving to these lands to claim the same sceneries. The heroic explorer traveller places one person in the picturesque landscape. It is the archetype of this contemporary explorer (the tourist, the brief visitor), who had this specific destination on their bucket list. The evidence can be published on Instagram, so it can be used for further marketing. The aesthetics for this kind of (commercial) landscape and travel photography derives from the romantic era landscape painting, in the spirit of David Kaspar Friedrich and his painting “The Wanderer above the Fog” (1818). The gaze of the tourist, as far his eyes can see, claims these “unmarked” territories, the lands of the Hobbits (or so they are let to believe).

This photo belong to a larger collaborative art project about the emerging mass tourism on the Faroe Islands and is a work-in-progress. I have been visiting the Faroe Islands since 2008 and working together with people from the art and cultural fields in different long-term and socio-culturally sustainable art projects. I consider Faroe Islands as one of my homes.

And great thanks for Hans Company Oy for sponsoring the yellow raincoat for this project!

I received Mobility Funding from the Nordic Culture Point to initiate the collaboration with the local people and to start the project.

The series of The Yellow Raincoats is featured as one of 18 projects selected for the Der Greif and the World Photo Organisation’s Open Call. Here is a direct link to the series on WPO’s website.

Here is a link to a more article like story with a series of different photos, published on the Photographic Museum of Humanity website.