In May 2022, I found myself on the island of Samos, right next to Turkey. Following a series of events - as recounted in my book-with-audio Borderline Visible - I ended up spending a day at the beach with a Congolese man called Anelka who had lost everything, including his sister, at the hands of FRONTEX and the Greek coastguards over the course of his three attempts to reach those shores.

While incomparable to the violent trauma of what Anelka had been through, my own journey thus far - a long research trip for an art project - hadn’t been easy. Things had spun off course, and I didn’t know what I was doing any more as an artist. I was also aware of not fulfilling any other role there. Not a businessman, not an aid worker or lawyer, not a journalist.

Hanging out together that day, we found ourselves playing the role of tourists. For our own very different reasons, we each knew this wasn’t what we were on the island for. My own mild sense of being an imposter gave a window onto the much stronger one being experienced by Anelka. It afforded us a strange distance on everything we ended up doing - strolling, bathing, observing, taking space, eating at a restaurant. Banality shot through with a sense of the extra-ordinary. Absolutely nothing taken for granted.

Since that day, I’ve been busy with how mainstream tourism, obviously enough, does not do business with sadness, fear, lament, rage or the complexities, problematics and contradictions of its own operations. DETOURISTIKI, in its researcher guise, continues to shape-shift but for now can be thought of as a tour guide who has given up pretending to ignore certain geopolitical realities and subjectivities, and may prefer to whisper, sing or scream than speak in monotone. It remains to be seen whether anyone wants to follow the little flag she holds high in her trembling hand.

DETOURISTIKI