GRAND TOUR EUROPE PAOLETTA HOLST
Biography Paoletta Holst is an architectural researcher and artist , based in Brussels . She graduated in Fine Arts at the Academy AKV | St . Joost in Breda and in Architectural History at the universities of Amsterdam and Ghent . Currently she is working as a Jan van Eyck participant on Grand Tour Europa , an artistic research project regarding the spatial understanding of tourism and immigration .
Talk Explorers , tourists , refugees , global shoppers , exiles , migrants , stateless persons and other adventurers , what do they have in common ? Modern tourism can be traced back to the Grand Tour , a tour along the cultural treasures of Europe , undertaken by upper class Europeans , at the age of Enlightenment . In very different ways the idea of a tour through Europe still captures the imagination of people : while tourists from all over the world travel to cultural highlights , refugees travel from place to place to reach a safe destination . They stopover in the same cities and have an equal fascination for their destinations , yet they are welcomed quite differently .