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  Tourism, cultural identity, and sustainable development : Lessons to be drawn from the Expo.02

Mrs Nelly WENGER - General Director of EXPO 2002, Lausanne, Switzerland

 

Expo.02 was the name given to the Sixth National Swiss Exhibition held in the Three Lakes Region from 15 May to 20 October last year.
Inaugurated for the first time in 1883 in Zurich, this event has become a ritual. The idea which then inspired the Confederation, and which was developed over the course of subsequent events was to reinforce national cohesion and to present the technological advancement of the country. Expo.02 has replayed in its own way, this tradition which unites the population around a common project. This time round, Switzerland took the opportunity to break down its identity into its multiple facets.
The National Exhibition is also a party: it is the joy of being together, the pleasure of meeting, the curiosity in discovering others, the desire to debate, to engage in dialogue, to line up together face to face with the country. The general ambience of Expo.02 opted for social interaction and a welcome for visitors.
Well, Expo.02 was quite an experience. In my eyes, the deeper meaning of a national exhibition is to let each person as an individual, and everyone all together, experience their country. Expo.02 offered an unusual way of thinking, living, and acting. It was a laboratory for experiencing our way of life in Switzerland over and beyond the traditional clichés and the contradictory slogans which are just so many stereotypes.
But more than that, the opportunity to experience your country is not enough :
Expo.02 was also a world expo. It brought Switzerland into tune with its era and into harmony with its times. Switzerland does not see itself as all alone, it has become a fragment of the world. 

In the discussion which I have the pleasure of presenting at this 4th Tourism Summit, I shall attempt to reply to the twin question which you ask the Expo.02 :

• How can Expo.02, conceived from the point of view of tourism, influence the cultural identity of Switzerland ?
• Can this action of identity enter into the perspective of sustainable development ?

These two questions will be taken up by contrasting two notions: the authentic and the simulated.

Tourism and identity

In the heart of modern society, the influence of tourism on identity is well known, whether national or local. Tourism produces a specific way of looking at the country, a look which becomes emblematic of the national identity. The tourist’s way of seeing things induces a profound change on the identity of a region, a town, a country. It is a double agent capable of producing change, prosperity, but also of inducing the syndrome of a living museum and conservatism. In return, the tourist image influences the way the local population looks at its own country.
In the case of Switzerland, tourism has played a major role in the creation of the national identity, and of the cantonal and local identities. From this point of view, the considerable role played by National Exhibitions should be emphasised. They have always promoted two parameters :

• the first is patriotism under the guise of national cohesion and presentation of diversity;
• the second is productive, industrial, cultural and artistic modernity The whole is played out in a concerto where tradition and modernity answer each other.

The national Exhibition, while considered as a great event, also has a tourist effect, because it constitutes a major tourist attraction first for internal tourism, and then for the image that Switzerland wishes to present to the outside.

In the first five national Exhibitions, Switzerland presented its technological modernity, but more than anything, its identity myth attached to a fundamental element of its countryside: the mountains. The Geneva Exhibition in 1896, the Bern Exhibition of 1914, and the Zurich Exhibition of 1939, all served to reinforce the myth of the Alps. This myth, updated every generation, made it possible to set up opposed pairs like modernity against tradition, or, again, the opposition of towns and mountains, or towns and countryside. In 1964, the Lausanne Exhibition made a timid attempt to renew the problematics.
With hindsight, it could be said that the national Exhibitions achieved a very sustainable development, because they imposed an image of Switzerland that has lasted for one and a half centuries.
But this image of Switzerland and this identity are currently going through a period of crises: the definition of the identity of Switzerland and the identities of the cantons and the regions are in crisis. Tourism in Switzerland is experiencing difficulties, and is seeking to carry out a fundamental renewal of what it offers and its image, but still does not know how, and what new icons to use, to replace the mountains, the chocolate, and the security.
I will give you one single example which throws this malaise into relief: the Swiss countryside. The tired, over prettified, excessively overpolished, picture postcard imagery of the Swiss landscape is under criticism, and just as much inside the country as well. Nevertheless, to date, no new forms or novel customs have been found to replace these stereotypes.
In the face of this crisis, which has become permanent over several years, what happened with Expo.02 ? To answer this question, I will describe the differences in this project, in comparison with the preceding National Exhibitions :

• Expo.02 is not held in a major city on the Swiss plateau. It has been run in a peripheral region which had just been through a major economic crisis.
• Expo.02 was dived between four sites (Bienne, Neuchâtel, Morat, and Yverdon-les Bains) with five “arteplages” - lakeside platforms - (four fixed arteplages and the mobile arteplage in the Jura). A whole region has become the theatre for the national event, overflowing its own borders and invading the entire country.
• Expo.02 produced events and exhibitions outside the traditional themes focussed on the town-mountain duality.
• Expo.02 was resolutely contemporary.
• Expo.02 aimed to be a World Expo, without national or local coloration.

If you try to make a first evaluation, you could say that from the point of view of the decline in identity and tourism, Expo.02 was a success which made it possible to find a temporary solution to the two-fold crisis. Switzerland won an exceptional level of internal tourism, and the population travelled en masse to the Three Lakes Region.
Outside Switzerland, and above all thanks to the foreign press, the country exported a new, modern image of culture and of openness to the world. This success can be explained by the fact that visitors have been able to renew their perception of identity, because they have experienced a different Switzerland.

To explain this success, I would emphasise several parameters :

1. In contrast to a landscape that is all too well-known, Expo.02 revealed a little known region, or at least less well-known one: the Three Lakes Region, a term that has become, with the preparations for the Expo.02 and the event itself, a label of origin, a place name.
2. Expo.02 did not attempt to fit this region into a Swiss picture postcard, but has offered other points of view on the landscape, in particular involving ground-breaking new architecture.
3. This architecture was built around icons, authentic symbols of the meaning of the event: The “Towers” of Bienne, the “Flying Saucers” and the “Palais de l’équilibre” pavilion at Neuchâtel, the Morat “Monolith”, and the “Cloud” at Yverdon-Les-Bains.
4. Rejecting stasis, Expo.02 created genuine mobility by articulating the National Exhibition around four sites, which meant visitors had to travel from one to the other by train or by boat. This is network mobility.
5. In contrast to the traditional diversities based on the languages and the cultures of the cantons, Expo.02 opted for a wider field of diversities coming from the whole world, and no longer confined to peculiarities of Switzerland.
6. Rejecting passivity, Expo.02 demanded the active participation of the visitor, who was obliged to move, to leave the Exhibition and go back into Switzerland, before being able to go back into another arteplage. This coming-and-going between fiction and reality was a particularly novel idea.
7. Facing the demand for actuality, Expo.02 was a contemporary event, a child of its times, breaking with the dowdy image of old-fashioned Switzerland.
8. Facing the demand for tradition, Expo.02 made possible a renewed display of local identities, in particular by means of the Canton Days.
9. Expo.02 was a popular gathering and a grand festival which made room for meetings, and confrontations, all at random in the shows and even in the queues.
10. In contrast to private transport, Expo.02 was an ecological success by making intensive use of mass transport, and especially the train, which left the purpose-built car parks almost empty. 

For all these reasons, it can be said that the success of Expo.02 has established the foundations of a new tourism, and a new identity without, nevertheless, providing definitive forms or ready-made recipes.

Expo.02 and sustainable development

On this point, it must be said at the outset that this question is at the very least a paradox. I will say at once that Expo.02 is a product of sustainable development by virtue of its ephemeral nature. Let me explain.

The guidelines for the project were insistent on the ephemeral aspect of the event and the construction. It was necessary to make something colossal, but respecting all the rules of the environment, the preservation of the flora and fauna, respect for the customs of the lake-side population, and so on. Being ephemeral was the starting point: Expo.02 could happen, but it couldn’t touch the landscape, and above all it had to return everything as good than before.

The ephemeral has often been seen as a constraint upon engineering and architecture. It was in fact necessary to look for unusual solutions and attempt new experiments, with no possible margin for error. But the ephemeral was more than anything an opportunity, because it made it possible to put on a genuine event, both on the architectural level (a “constructed event”) and on the level of bringing together a population for a limited time (a “performance”, a unique moment to be experienced in Switzerland).

Expo.02 is therefore exemplary in the sense that it became possible to conceive a mega-event in a territory charged with culture, with history, and highly protected. Expo.02 can therefore be defined as a tourist event, an event seeking identity and experimentation, which took possession of a whole country. In this sense, Expo.02 was radically different from the theme parks and attraction parks, which are constructed in the no man’s land on the outskirts of cities and which maintain no bonds with their surroundings. By resting fully on the strength of the ephemeral - Expo.02 is right now in the process of being demolished – soon there will be nothing left to see.

Expo.02 also worked out a form of sustainable development on the levels of tourism and identity by playing on memory. The fact is that the more icons are seen to be ephemeral, the more they will become lasting memories capable of generating individual and collective memory. Now it is up to the region to play on the recapture of this memory, and to make the public come back to this territory stamped with the seal of Expo.02. It is all still wide open, and up to the initiative of the local politicians.

The question of the authentic and the simulated

In the light of these relations how should we judge the cultural, tourist, and identity elements offered by Expo.02 ?

First of all, let us say that Expo.02 rested on the construction of a fiction, a new account of Switzerland and life in Switzerland, a Switzerland which is a fragment of the world. There was therefore a degree of pretence in Expo.02, there was a degree of artifice in Expo.02. To present the country today, we opted for the forces of invention, imagination, experimentation. To translate the country as it is in miniature in a theme park would have had a widespread impact before the event. We often think, quite wrongly, that the real corresponds to the direct, the face-to-face, the evident, the reproduction of the same. Expo.02 did just the opposite. It created an object, a complete fabrication, the result of a dream of a few designers, a bit mad and original. It built an artifice. It materialised on sites on the land and on the water. It caused a fleet of fast shuttle craft to appear on the calm waters of the lakes. It erected an architecture like nothing else that was known, not following the currently fashionable architectural ideas, not repeating Swiss architecture. Expo.02 opted for fiction, for imagination, to represent the country and the ties we maintain with it.

To express reality, to present our country, it was necessary to make use of metaphor, imagery, a roundabout route, theatrical presentation. Being authentic today no longer means being stuck to folklore, the land, and the traditional images. These old values seemed to us to be insufficient because they lacked resonance in today’s society. They were not, however, completely banished, but found their expression in the Canton Days, where they do still have the possibility of having some meaning.

In reality, what seems false today is more the picture postcard imagery of Switzerland, rather than the icons of the “arteplages”. The simulated is much better fixed in a conserved, preserved, fossilised, landscape rather than in its untimely reanimation in the architecture of Expo.02.

And now, to end up, I will give you the example of the most testing part of this articulation between authenticity and simulation, between the true and the false, by giving you a quick description of the Morat arteplage as conceived by Jean Nouvel and his team.

When we visit Morat, we find ourselves in the heart of the ideal Swiss “bourg”. Morat represents the place for the perfect life, a setting preserved from all impurity. It is pure nostalgia. Morat symbolises the values of permanence and well-being of an unchanging Switzerland. The theme of the arteplage at Morat was Instant and Eternity. Jean Nouvel’s arteplage is fitted into the town itself. The project introduced a kind of perversity by placing the source of the disruption right in the centre of the town, breaking the system, producing a blemish. Jean Nouvel opted for the aesthetics of the quarry, of the precarious, of demolition, by arranging around the town workmen’s huts, freight containers, public lavatories with corrugated roofs, structures like heaps of gravel or piles of logs, all these structures holding exhibitions or services. We found ourselves face-to-face with a series of situations which had no family relationship with the aesthetics of the town, nor with the materials used for the houses, nor with the spirit of a proper Swiss town. Quite the contrary. These constructions reconstructed the space in the town and its lake-side landscape.
Jean Nouvel was charmed by Morat. He chose not to try to outbid its beauty by reproducing its hallowed motifs. By using materials and forms which were out of kilter with those which were customary in the place, he imposed today’s times, with its cadences, rhythms, and counter-rhythms. With Expo.02, it was as if time started again in Morat. Morat which drags Switzerland in its train, Morat which sees its time disassembled but also reassembled like a clock gathering up the energy to tick off the moments in another rhythm.

Expo.02 brought into play all the resources of fiction to make us see the most typical places in our country, the most permanent values of our identity, in a different way. Expo.02 gave a powerful, playful treatment to a rebuilt authenticity. This authenticity smashes sham and clichés. Many hope today that this new authenticity will be sustained, and that other projects of this kind will see the light of day.

 

Nelly Wenger
President of the General Management of Expo.02

With the collaboration of Véronique Mauron and Bernard Crettaz