Aurora stenersen
Keywords: Tourism, Belonging, Place
My hometown in Northern Norway, Henningsvær, has roughly 500 residents but attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists yearly. It has become somewhere people travel to rather than live, and where local people’s daily lives have become merely a backdrop for travelers and their cameras.
Through knitting, a craft deeply connected to the local history and culture, the imbalance between the number of visitors and local inhabitants is visualized by translating statistics into knitted stitches.
The island is mapped out with 520 stitches representing its residents, surrounded by 250 000 stitches representing the roughly estimated yearly visitors to the small town.
By photographing, I reconstruct the town as I remember it, before mass tourism, colored by childhood nostalgia and associations with a mundane life, presented as postcards. To contrast this, I collect existing tourist photographs from Instagram, highlighting repetition and questioning how my hometown has been visually reduced, constructed, and sold.
The project is not a rejection of tourism, but an examination of the touristic gaze and what it is blind to.
