Introduction

This chapter takes as its inspiration the well-established idea of living well with dementia and how this somewhat vague and contested idea might be effectively operationalised through an application to leisure and tourism businesses and activities. The purpose of this chapter is to give an overview of a nascent area of dementia-friendly activity: that of the visitor economy, which encompasses the range of businesses, services and spaces used by visitors to a neighbourhood, and often by local residents too. The interactions in, and value of, the largely neglected visitor economy concept within dementia studies is important as businesses and organisations that manage and promote place-based experiences and activities can enrich the lives of people with dementia, and their families and carers. This is relevant not only to visitors to a locale, but also to local residents, who also use and benefit from visitor economy businesses and services.

We review a programme of research that we have been pursuing to raise the profile of the visitor economy as an issue within both academic and practitioner agendas through tools and advocacy. Our principal focus throughout this research programme, which has involved different stakeholders (including those impacted by dementia in the community, and businesses and organisations that have responsibility for service delivery), is to enhance the accessibility of the visitor economy for people with dementia, thereby opening up neighbourhoods more fully so as to address a broader civil society objective of enhancing participation. This chapter also seeks to conceptualise these places as not just existing for residents, but also for visitors, and that people living with dementia exist in both categories. Our coverage in this chapter is necessarily selective but we seek to highlight some of the key dementia-related issues associated with the visitor economy and research and strategic responses that are starting to drive principles and practice forward. Our focus is on Great Britain although the principles we discuss have equal applicability within an international context.

Tourism and leisure as part of a dementia-friendly neighbourhood

Leisure as a broad concept encompasses a diverse spectrum of activity that incorporates long-haul travel through to going for a swim at a leisure centre and to home-based activities, such as knitting or watching television (see Page and Connell, 2010).

The return of identity and the exhaustion of storytelling

Breaking with the sterile cycle that leads from the affirmation of identity as an immutable essence to its negation in the supposed inevitability of homogenization, contemporary thought proposes identity as a construction which emerges through narration. This new way of thinking about identity aims to account both for the changes which traverse mono-identities and the emergence of multiculturalities which exceed ethnic, racial and national categories.

In this chapter I address the meaning and representativity of the term ‘Cuban popular culture’ through two rather different test-cases, the first of which is the film Aventuras de Juan Quinquín (1967) by the Cuban film director Julio García-Espinosa (b. 1926), and the second the religious social phenomenon of santería. In each case I ask the question of the extent to which the energy of popular culture is co-opted into a new (revolutionary) value-system or whether, ultimately, it escapes that hermeneutic net. It is legitimate to argue that García-Espinosa's films as much as santería as we nowadays understand the phenomenon came into being as a result of the Cuban Revolution. The experience of a revolution in Cuba in 1959 was as decisive for its generation as the French Revolution had been for European intellectuals in the 1790s. As Hobsbawm puts it: ‘It was now known that social revolution was possible; that nationals existed as something independent of states, peoples as something independent of their rulers, and even that the poor existed as something independent of the ruling classes’ (1962: 91). Hobsbawm's last point about the ‘poor’ existing ‘as something independent of the ruling classes’ is particularly relevant to the Cuban context. Hugh Thomas provides a sense of Fidel Castro's particular personal impact among the popular sectors of Cuban society soon after the Revolution:

‘Popular culture’ has always represented a fulcrum within social, cultural and anthropological discourses in Latin America. It has often been imagined as inhabiting interstitial and heterogeneous spaces that have represented a challenge to the dominant cultural paradigms of the ‘lettered city’ since at least Colonial times, and has repeatedly been mapped on to political, economic and even libidinal boundaries – between the country and the city, between the folk and the street, between the ‘masses’ and elite national/political structures. Yet since at least the turn of the millennium, concepts of the ‘folk’, the ‘mass', the ‘people’ and the ‘multitude’ have exploded in the face of new cultural and informational technologies, with cinematic, televisual, narrative, musical and cybernetic manifestations of popular culture at the forefront of social processes which mediate between the national and the global in a see-sawing climate of technocratic neoliberal economic ideology, financial crises marked by new and intensified social problems, boom and bust cycles in commodities and resource-extraction, and the rise of demagogic, mediatic neo-populisms.

In this chapter I would like to reflect on the ways in which the Magdalena river has figured both in the imaginary production of a Colombian national-popular body, and in its dissolution, and at key moments in Colombian history from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. I do so not to reclaim the river and its landscape, in a Romantic vein, as the wellspring of some authentic national ‘spirit’. Instead I am more interested in how instances of the articulation of such a thing occur in both real and imagined spaces where the nation's integrity is most questionable and the porosity of its borders most conspicuous.

As the principal route for the traffic of people, ideas and capital between colonial times and the early twentieth century, the Magdalena was for a long time central to the construction of the nation. Even today, as flows of global capital and information have displaced the organic motif of the river as an index of historical time and of the nation's temporal unfolding (see Appadurai 1996; Castells 2000), the Magdalena retains an affectively loaded presence in works of Colombian art and literature. Thus, in texts such as Fernando Vallejo's El río del tiempo (1998), where nature's collapse mirrors the entropy of Colombian public life, or films such as Bolívar soy yo (Jorge Alí Triana 2002), where history dissolves into the two dimensionality of the spectacle, the Magdalena continues to perform a labour of figuration, albeit of the nation's destiny as pipedream or curse.

This chapter discusses the work of internationally acclaimed, influential mixed-and multimedia artists who may be situated between the introduction in the 1990s in Cuba of the policy that granted artists the right to receive payment in convertible currency as well as to promote their work abroad freely, the introduction of a parallel currency for foreign visitors and investors (peso cubano convertible) and the ironic taking stock of the effects that such liberalization and commerce had on visual art practice referenced by the exhibition Cubanos convertibles in 2008. Its reflections play on the slippage between ‘convertible’ currency and convertible vehicles in relation to the value assigned to convertibility in aesthetic and cultural paradigms. These artists' deconstructivist strategies have sought to critique globalization while dismantling the complicitous ‘impurities’ and incongruities of their own productivity, seen through the distorting mirror of frustrated consumerism at home and the voracity of the free market paragons abroad that promote and consume their wares. The twisted skein of the analysis aims to discuss an interestingly impersonal (although archival) reflexive trend in contemporary art that, fibred by notions of social responsibility, participatory spectatorship and dissent, has explored the notion of ‘recycling’ as broadly inclusive of material disjecta with attendant ideas of ingestion and reconversion. Pieces have been predicated on the shift of emphasis from the phenomenology of ‘beholding’ to the involvement of the public as recipient, correspondent, interlocutor or user, with attention focused on the body of the observer and on experience.

At the beginning of his seminal social history of the Revolution, Alan Knight describes Mexico on the eve of the outbreak of the civil war:

The formation of national sentiments has become a key theme in the burgeoning critical literature devoted to the politics of popular culture in the post-revolutionary period. Commentators have analysed how, in the aftermath of the profound upheavals of a war in which peasants, workers and the middle classes made, albeit uneasy, common cause, they came to unite under the rubric of shared symbols, icons and discourses experienced as national (Vaughan and Lewis 2006). Culture, particularly those forms and practices designated as popular –folk artisanship and music, and mass media forms, such as the radio and cinema – participated in the transformation of Mexico from ‘a regionally, culturally fragmented country into a modern nation-state with an inclusive and compelling national identity’ (López 2010: 2). Far from being a top-down process, the cultural-political construct that emerged in this period ‘was shaped, resisted, and ultimately negotiated by a multitude of actors and interests, and lo mexicano came to serve counterhegemonic impulses as well as regime projects’ (Joseph et al. 2001: 8).

In recent years there has been a veritable explosion in Internet use in Latin America; according to recent statistics, in South America alone there are over 143 million Internet users, or 36.5 per cent of the population, representing an increase of over 900 per cent between 2000 and 2009.1 Alongside this growth in Internet use there has been a concomitant growth in literary, socio-cultural and artistic works which make use of the new medium, including blogs, hypertext novels, hypermedia fiction, net.art, online performance art, hacktivism and tactical media, among many others. From the first forays of the Zapatistas into the uses of new media technologies for oppositional purposes, giving rise to the term ‘digital Zapatismo’ (Domínguez c.1998), to the complex negotiations of on- and offline activism of the self-styled Chicano ‘cyberpunk media artist’ Fran Ilich, through to the multiple uses of digital technologies in by the now large and growing community of net.artists in Latin America, new media technologies in Latin America have been put to use in innovative and challenging ways by local practitioners, and frequently involve a consideration for the socio-political consequences of such technologies and their potentially resistant reworking.

While the wide range of tactical media projects, net.art, game art, hacktivism and other genres within Latin American digital culture cannot be subsumed into one universal model, one striking feature that is common to many of them is the way in which they involve a critical engagement with the on/offline interface, and the resistant reuse of (globalized) digital technologies, two notions which will be explored in more depth below.

The philosopher Bernard Stiegler argues that the ever-increasing technologization of memory is complicit with the shift in the nature of power towards a ‘society of control’. Stiegler borrows this term from Gilles Deleuze who, in his essay of 1990 entitled ‘Postscript on a Society of Control’, himself borrowed the term from William Burroughs to describe a nightmarish extension of the logic of Foucauldian discipline that parallels a shift towards a social logic governed by the flexibility and mobility afforded by digital technologies. Rather than rely on Deleuze's definition of the term (which emphasizes the crisis of the spaces of disciplinary enclosure described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish and their replacement by a flexible logic of ‘control’ or ‘modulation’) Stiegler argues that the society of control is characterized by the total automation of consumption. Rather than just the means of production, in the control society consumption and the network of desires and affective intensities that drive consumption have become automated.

Stiegler argues that the fundamental interdependence of memory and technology is the crucial battleground on which the transition towards the nightmarish vision of the control society is negotiated and contested. He starts from the premise that the externalization of memory in technological tools is constitutive of humanity. As Stiegler explains in his essay ‘Memory’, which introduces ideas explored in greater detail in his three-volume Technics and Time, he uses the term ‘hypomnesis’ to describe the technical exteriorization of memory, which he opposes to the act of embodied memory ‘anamnesis’.