The origin of “Event for Touristic Sites” can be traced to September 2000, to a ceramic tile I saw in a flea market in Singapore. It was the kind of tile that usually says ‘home sweet home’ or ‘here 'tis’, that you hang on your toilet wall, but this one was a list of ten national stereotypes: ALL AMERICANS ARE OBNOXIOUS, ALL FRENCH ARE RUDE, ALL ITALIANS ARE HORNY, ALL BRITISH ARE SNOBS etc. I was in Singapore waiting for the Olympics to finish before I returned to Sydney, after a year of travelling. I was pretty tuned in to differences between cultures – as experienced by a tourist – and to the way stereotypes can grow through superficial, brief encounters between tourists and locals. So although I couldn’t bring myself to buy the ceramic tile, I copied down the list of stereotypes in my notebook.

In early 2001 I contributed to Uniglory, an artists' book, whose theme was ‘Tourist’. I printed the national
stereotypes on the cover of the book, expanding the list from 10 nations to about 22. Working in collaboration with a Sydney artist I organised an ‘event’ for the launch of Uniglory, at tourist-rich Circular Quay. We stencilled the stereotypes onto t-shirts, and took them along to the launch. That became the first “Event for Touristic Sites". There are now 45 shirts and counting, and the event has toured to 5 cities.

The first site at Circular Quay, looked across to the Sydney Opera House. The Opera House (along with Uluru) is
probably the tourist icon in Australia, our ‘most
photographed barn’. Next I took the shirts up to Canberra, to the new National Museum of Australia. There's an amazing, weird landscape-architecture piece there called the "Garden of Australian Dreams" which you can roam around. It has Aboriginal place names and white locations marked on it, a kind of Leyland Brothers World play park, and the museum staff wear Drizabones and Akubras(!) In Melbourne I went for the site of the "Yellow Peril", a big yellow steel public sculpture, which everyone seems to hate. Its racist name was so appropriate for the “Event for Touristic Sites", and it made for good shots against the city skyline. Then we trooped across the bridge in our t-shirts to Southbank, where we couldn't keep up with the amount of interest and participation from promenading tourists.

The instructions for the event are as follows:
Stencil offensive national stereotypes on to white
t-shirts. Invite friends to meet, and wear shirts. Have photos taken in front of iconic location. Tourists will participate if encouraged. Engage and offends them where necessary. Repeat event at sites of inflated national pride.
The instructional nature of the piece means it can be carried out by anyone. The event has travelled to Perth and Berlin without me. So, people get together at a certain time and place and begin
posing and shooting cheesy touristy shots. Generally curious passers-by stop and ask us what we're doing, and that's when we cajole them to take part in the posing/shooting. Many give us a wide berth, but some are amused enough to bite, and sift through the available shirts to find one which is right for them. Participants often use the
opportunity to grab a shirt, which represents a nation they have some connection to, either through ancestry or travel, and about which they have their own stories to tell.

The event thrives on interactions, disagreements and
enthusiastic endorsements of the stereotypes. Perhaps the most disturbing response is when people say, "that's really spot on!" in relation to the stereotypes. It's not uncommon to hear "Oh you can't say THAT about the Finnish" or "You know, that's SO TRUE, all Maltese ARE paranoid". Of course, none of the stereotypes are true, but the participants' are not getting the irony of the work, and are just reading the texts as either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.

People generally respond with good humour, and are not offended themselves,although mention that there is the potential for others to be offended. I wonder what this says about ‘unsayability’ with regards to cultural difference... I think that institutionalised racism (principally by our
governments) masquerading as economic/legal ‘logic’ has made this into a hot topic since I started the t-shirt project. Racial profiling in criminal investigations is rife, and airport security has now normalised suspicion of travellers by race or physical appearance. ALL AFGHANS ARE
TERRORISTS has become a sort of unspoken truth.

Of course I run the risk of being seen as a racist myself, especially when one of the shirts is isolated from the group. It would be a very brave person who could walk through Yogyakarta wearing ALL INDONESIANS ARE
CORRUPT. When the shirts are grouped together their absurdity is evident.

I've been thinking I might attempt to make a shirt for every nation in the world. It will get interesting with nations that have been “annexed” or swallowed up into larger states. Those countries which have a strong identity but which are not recognised, internationally, as sovereign states in their own right. For instance, Oromia, Kurdistan, Assyria, and until recently East Timor. So the t-shirt project can honour these countries by granting them their own offensive
stereotypes. Nationhood is fluid and evolving, and never finished or stable. Which is really relevant today with all the panic about border-crossings by refugees.