Abstracts

Paolo Bosca (Bio)

Participatory eco-art practices, inland areas and touristic hospitality.

This paper aims to explore two examples of contemporary participatory art practices (Bishop 2012) to show how, through specific practices of an-archiviation (Muphie 2016)(Manning, 2020) of the touristic capital (Urry 2002)(Virgolin 2023), they build an inclusive, complex and sustainable framework for touristic experience of hospitality in Italy’s inland areas. The two examples are • Spazio Vacante’s project ECHO, that explores the informal material and immaterial archives of three villages in inland Sicily (IT) to develop participatory experiences of interaction with the place guided by its human and nonhuman inhabitants. In their practice, they mix the two meanings of “hosting”, namely to-host and to-be-hosted. • Casa delle Agriculture’s 10 years’ work in developing common infrastructures to share a deep history of Apulian landscapes and its traumas through pedagogical and participatory eco-art practices (Bosca & Faccini 2025). Their practice positions the tourist itself as a practictioner of care, helping to delve deeply and within a broad aesthetical framwork into the territory where it is host. The analysis will use theoretical tool of “anarchive” – defined by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi within TheSenseLab as the re-activation of the traces that stand still in every formal or informal archive – to activate processes of change and participation. In conclusion, this paper will show how this kind of contemporary art – namely eco-art (Morton 2018)(Ardenne 2019) or participatory art – can be a useful tool to reconsider the experience and meaning of hospitality within touristification, especially in inland and fragile areas.