NS34 Session 23 - Outdoor session

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Title: Walking towards more-than-human tourism futures - Outdoor session

Organisers: Elva Björg Einarsdóttir, Emily Höckert, Jasmine Zhang and Maxim Vlasov

Affiliation: University of Iceland, University of Lapland, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Umeå University

Participation: This outdoor session welcomes all symposium participants as co-walkers. The gathering and departure take place in front of the venue’s main entrance

Description

This outdoor session explores walking as a relational practice. It consists of situated, shared, and uncertain steps with the symposium landscape of Öskjuhlíð as a participant in inquiry. Through collective movement and small-scale experimental interventions, we ask what tourism might become if it cultivated more-than-human relations rather than extracted value.

The session joins efforts within the environmental humanities and social sciences that challenge the prevailing nature–culture dichotomy by asking how more-than-human communities might coexist in creative, reciprocal, and regenerative ways. Rather than relying solely on techno-scientific solutions, we are interested in how alternative ontologies, conceptualisations, and embodied practices may help repair weakened relations between ecosystems and human sociocultural worlds. This prompts the question: what would it mean for tourism to “walk differently”?

Across the Nordic region, climate walks, ecological pilgrimages, and slow mobility initiatives are emerging as embodied responses to ecological concern and responsibility. Such practices are broadening our understanding of tourism and outdoor recreation amid the ecological crisis. Rather than focusing on what walking produces (well-being, economic value, resilience), this session explores how walking might shape relations between people, species, temporalities, places, research practices, and lived worlds.

Abstracts

Title: Weaving a Partial History of the Western Part of Öskjuhlíð
Author: Tarja Salmela, UiT The Arctic University of Norway

In the introduction to Öskjuhlíð at Reykjavik’s official home page, many types of matter and life forms gather through a narrative (“Öskjuhlíð”). This narrative is laced with temporality yet scattered into smaller stories wherein “Geology” is differentiated from “Flora and wildlife” and, remarkably, “History”. Öskjuhlíð’s “History” however weaves together actors involved in the smaller stories, including ruins of an old Vikursel farm, sheep, sheep pens, rock, students, Latin School, quarry, railway, soldiers, Second World War, guns, trenches, barracks, roads, and thermal water tanks. In this intervention, I invite participants to enact in practice an embodied, necessarily partial, alternative “History” of Öskjuhlíð as we walk together in the western part of Öskjuhlíð and Vatnsmýri—a site where, according to the “Öskjuhlíð” narrative—“various structures” emerged to the landscape through the presence of British and American soldiers. Attending to what once was and what is now, and to the ways in which more-than-humanness of place emerges as weaving-together of co-composing durabilities-and-lively-presences, we enact a partial history of Öskjuhlíð that is sensitive towards the idea of the potential of visiting [here used as alternative concept for tourism] to cultivate more-than-human relations across temporalities. Our walking together takes the form of site-responsive reading, following a “three-step pause” method: three minutes of stillness at a chosen spot to notice co-presences; three minutes of slow, intentional walking while silently tracing one temporal layer (e.g., “what geology do my feet feel?”); and three minutes of shared gesture—pointing, miming, or light touch—to mark a moment of co-composition with Öskjuhlíð element (e.g. a rock, ruin of a road, a patch of grass). We will spend the remaining time for voluntary sharing of our experiences of weaving a partial history of the western part of Öskjuhlíð.

Spatial and material requirements: Competence within the group to lead us to the western part of Öskjuhlíð and Vatnsmýri.

Title: Walking with Collective Temporalities
Author: Chris E. Hurst, Northumbria University

The proposed walking intervention experiments with attending to temporalities co-mingling among more-than-human walking encounters. This walking intervention is intended to engage a small group of humans to explore how temporalities are co-experienced in tourism places and how temporalities may come to shape our embodied experience of being-with many amidst planetary-wide nature transformation. Nature transformation is posed as an ethico- relational responsibility eschewing the promises of an original nature to be returned to in this period of climatic change. This intervention experiments with how we might care with tourism places comprised of collectives of kin temporalities (including several geological ‘cenes’, life progressions, and temporal rhythms) overlapping and being transformed in this contemporary Anthropocene era. I will begin with a short introduction to the contents of the activity and read a passage of invitation (2-3 minutes). Participants will be asked to walk around the area choosing one individual kin member (human or nonhuman) to attend to as they move (or sit or stand) with place (8 minutes). During the walk, participants will be prompted to consider the sensory and affective experience of attuning to their chosen kin, and how this intentional kin-ing attention shapes and is shaped by different life courses/life progressions or rhythms coming into contact with one another. Following this, participants will gather together to debrief and reflect on their experience (4-5 minutes), considering what (if any) changes occurred through this intervention and if/how temporal interventions with kin could be used to facilitate novel ethical, responsible, or environmentally-just tourism futures.

Title: Walking the Vatnsfjörður Trail
Author: Elva Björg Einarsdóttir, University of Iceland

The Vatnsfjörður Trail runs through a half-century-old nature reserve in the northwest of Iceland. Formally conserved in 1975 because of its beautiful landscapes, scrubs and traditional land use with grazing, fishing, and foraging for berries and herbs. Since then, it has developed into a popular tourist destination, including establishing outdoor facilities and walking paths. Plans to elevate the area's status to a national park were halted in 2021 due to a proposed hydro power plant.

The Vatnsfjörður Trail was conceived during walks in the Vatnsfjörður nature reserve to raise awareness of its importance and its diverse more-than-human voices that are to be heard there. Recently the Minister for the Environment, Energy and Climate confirmed that hydroelectric development in the Vatnsfjörður reserve would not proceed. The Vatnsfjörður Trail is a part of the Ecological Pilgrimage project.

At the 34^th Nordic Symposium on Tourism and Hospitality Research in Reykjavík, Iceland I will introduce the Vatnsfjörður Trail and take participants for a reparative walk focusing on engaging all the senses. The walk encourages participants to recognise that their stories are not the only ones embedded in the landscape.

Title: Encountering Extinction: Narrating Stillness with Moving Atmospheres
Author: Katrín Anna Lund, University of Iceland

At the coastal line of Skerjafjörður, close to Öskjuhlíð, sits an aluminum replica of a big bird, a Great Auk, but the two last of its kind were killed in the Island, Eldey, located just in south of Reykjanes Peninsula in 1844. It was made by artist, Salvör Nordal, for an exhibition called the coastline in 1998 but in 2000 the city of Reykjavík bought the statue and replaced it in at the same spot where it was first exhibited.

On New Years Day 2008 I took a walk with a friend along the coastline and into Skerjafjörður. I did not know beforehand about the replica being placed there but I still remember seeing the outline of it as we passed it vaguely in dusk. I was stricken by its apparent stillness in the moving atmosphere of the January sunset. Afterwards, its presence continued to linger with me and since then I regularly take a walk to Skerjafjörður to greet the Great Auk. What attracts me is the sense of stillness that becomes even stronger as it exaggerates the ever moving and vital surroundings; choreographies of earth, water, air and light and shapes the atmosphere with narratives into which one enmeshes. I want invite the participants in this session to encounter and connect to the Great Auk in Skerjafjörður to allow its narratives to linger as it can tell much about the importance of staying with, to be with and nourish the more-than-human relations we entangle with.