Continuing our glossary series to provide insight into the terms we are thinking with, this week we are focusing on: Spectatorship.

The term is generally used to describe the act of watching something without taking part and has often been a site of critical inquiry within curatorial theory. However, we are particularly interested in thinking about the term in the context of mass tourism, cultural mega events and underlining exoticism. Art critic Claire Bishop describes the term in Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship as: “the audience, previously conceived as a ‘viewer’ or ‘beholder’, is now repositioned as a co­-producer or participant”. However, when considering the phenomenon of spectatorship in the case of Venice and other city Biennales, spectatorship continues to be assumed as a passive term. Following the recent protests in the city that demand new approaches to the tourism industry including that surrounding the Venice Biennale, we are questioning the role of spectatorship within this controversy. How much participation do tourists have in the seemingly passive, but in fact, active destruction of human and other than human ecosystems in Venice? In the precarisation if its workers and citizens, and in the overall ruination of a sustainable life in the city? What is spectarship when tourists only come to "see" but watching becomes a distructive force?

The Biennale format has created a model that reduces the local setting to a photogenic background where the visitor is a spectator with limited exposure to the living reality of the city. The architectural fabric of the city no more than romanticizes ruinporn to set the scene for international visitors of the event. The city becomes a commodity that adds to the event through faux authenticity and atmosphere, without an agency of its own. Jan van der Borg and Antonio Paolo Russo have advocated a change of the current tourist industry in Venice in their article “Towards Sustainable Tourism in Venice” describing how the “(…) human and natural ecosystem have been modified to host the mass of tourists arriving.”
We have to renegotiate it’s terms, how will we live together?