Art and the Future City @ Beursschouwburg Symposium "Art and the Future City" | Page 11

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.