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-‘How are you?’

-‘I am on tour’

Today traveling seems to be the most natural free time activity. But mass tourism is a development of a not so distant past. It emerged after the Second World War and quickly became a striking symbol of post-war recovery when tourism was associated with economic growth. Flows of tourists have generated the worlds’ most popular destinations within the Mediterranean basin, Cyprus being among the most attractive touristic places.

The consequences of the liberation of travel followed soon. We are now living in the era of excess when further extensive tourist practices threat to cause serious environmental danger and social changes. Places of touristic attraction have become hostages of travel industry. The nonattached fluent superficial gaze of a tourist sweeps through landscapes and cities blurring their distinctive features and leaving them blank to compete against each other.

-‘What kind of society we might have, If a stone could act?’

‘Cyprus Amber’ is a neuroleptic stone that captures highly mobile bodies with a particular range of chemical composition. Mutated under the influence of frequent travel mobile bodies are no longer resistant to manipulation by Amber. Whether it bewitches individuals in the tourist agencies, souvenir stores, penetrates into consumer goods or disperses itself in the air and water the stone always finds its way inside recipient bodies and begins to construct their desires and aspirations. Touristic places and bodies are becoming containers not only for information (experience, memories, etc.) but mainly for the new intellectual substance called ‘Cyprus Amber’ which is an offspring of the generation of excess.

The imaginary stone ‘Cyprus Amber’ is made of materials collected by creators of the project on the beaches, caught in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea or gathered in other popular tourist spots of Cyprus. We walked at night armed with UV flashlights and collected all objects glowing in the UV-rays. We transformed what we found into a new ‘local attraction’. Naming it Amber we import an important symbol of another tourist place, the Baltic Sea Amber from Kaliningradskaya Oblast in Russia. Through this naming we want to emphasize the paradoxical mix of presence and absence, here and there, and to indicate that tourist attractions are increasingly manipulative, commodified and simulated.

‘Cyprus Amber’ is our reflection on a probable scenario of unconscious touristic consumption of places where an object acts as an agent of influence. Exploring the paradigm of touristic mentality, we are playing, on the one hand, with its phobias, anxieties and fears, and on the other, with its rapacious fantasies, hopes and beliefs.

Salvation came in the form of stone

Or at least that's what it felt like (*)