The Desire to Travel: Being a Tourist in the Twenty-First Century
By Charlotte Stace
The CCCB hosts the writer Geoff Dyer and journalist and writer Laura Fernández, who come to talk about tourism.
Tourism is one of the most extraordinary phenomena of contemporary life, with a powerful symbolic universe. English writer Geoff Dyer has pondered this in books including Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (2010) and White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World (2017), in which he examines the experience of today’s traveller who is often aspiring to a unique, authentic experience, while also being aware that the trip is carefully staged.
In this session, he speaks with writer Laura Férnandez who has recently published Hay un monstruo en el lago (There’s a Monster in the Lake, 2024), in which she reflects on the construction of the tourist tale arising from the myth of the Loch Ness monster. They’ll discuss answers to a number of questions: What does it mean to travel? Why do we visit certain places? What lies behind this experience?