ABSTRACT
The chapter explores how the urgency for tourism expansion mobilises artistic and design creativity, by asking artists and designers to turn natural worlds into ‘specimen’ of potentially dying ecosystems that humanity has to museumify. This is reconnoitred through associations of Stefanos Kontos’ ‘Underwater Gallery’ with other similar projects in other parts of the world. As an educational project, the museumification of nature assumes the form of inner travel that reflects dark and global-heritage tourist styles. This form of ‘dark’ exploration replaces traditional forms of mystical and existential pilgrimage with scientifically friendly displays in experimental underwater museums. The two agential forces of artwork and tourism encounter humanity’s twin (self) destructive projects: the Capitalocene (capitalism expansion) and the Anthropocene (human domination over nature and life). Under these systemic and structural restrictions, ecological artists and designers are asked to discharge the self-contradictory duties of activist action and marketable creative spectatorship (make ecofriendly art for global visitors). The chapter is of interest to interdisciplinary social and political theorists, cultural sociologists, sociologists of culture, post/decolonial scholars, tourism, museum and performance/event studies theorists.
