Wall, Pine and Sea

The theme of this conference is Tourism Justice. Ours is also a story of justice, but the kind where reconciliation, restoration, or redistributive justice may no longer be plausible. A justice where time cannot be reversed or catastrophe erased, but where holding open possibilities of beauty in ruins and hearing stories of partial recuperation may offer a new sensibility for other forms of just beginnings to emerge (Barad, 2012; Haraway 2016, Tsing et al. 2017).The end was predictable anyway. Everybody knows that threesomes bend towards drama. This story begins where most end, when the deed has been committed and there is no way back. The question now was, how to live with the scar, how to find a way in, through and amidst tragedy. The story we weave revolves around the uncanny entangled lives of three protagonists – Wall, Pine and Sea. These characters will be well known to most of you, but their kinship is so ancient that at times it is taken for granted. Here we invite their knotted friendship to take the spotlight. This conversation across times and materialities unfolds in two places where Wall, Pine and Sea connect and belong: Mallorca (Spain) and Fukushima (Japan). Inspired by philosophical and artistic traditions that explore diverse ontologies, new materialism, the poetical, and speculative fabulations, we experiment with the intersecting drama of tourism and coastal development through a theatrical, playful and visual recollection of our lived memories and long lasting engagement with these three characters. Listening to their story we begin to take notice of the deep histories through which the human/non-human disturbances brought the fates of Wall, Pine, and Sea together, and the ways their ongoing bonds endure in the present. This presentation is an invitation to imagine what happens when Wall, Pine and Sea are understood to co-exist and co-create the social, cultural and political groundwork of coastal tourism spaces and places. As much a personal journey as it is academic, we ask what kind of criticality and justice arise when we are asked to empathize with monstrous seawalls and have compassion in a time of loss.