This final installment of the Long Live Tourism! Cigarette Campaign centers on a performance documented across four locations in East and West Berlin. It is accompanied by two large-format color posters and a black-and-white photo series. Conceived as part of the exhibition Gặp Việt Nam at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, the work interrogates themes of visibility, precariousness, and the commodification of identity.
In the performance, I embody a lone female figure dressed in red with long, straight black hair, standing inconspicuously with a plastic bag and bulk package of Tourism cigarettes tucked under my arm. The original video documentation captured long, unedited sequences of this waiting – my body occupying public space without explanation. This silent presence becomes simultaneously banal and unsettling, drawing attention to how racialized, gendered bodies might be read and categorized in public environments.
The edited version, Long Live Tourism! Cigarette Campaign – Part 3: Cigarette Diary, incorporates my short written reflections on the experience. Inhabiting this precarious role was both an act of curiosity and a naive gesture. It exposed an underlying tension between the artistic intention to critique and the risk of reinforcing the very stereotypes it sought to question. It exposed the tension between my artistic intention to critique and the risk of reinforcing stereotypes. The static camera gaze adds another layer of voyeurism, implicating both myself as observer and the viewer as participant in acts of surveillance, while transforming the performance’s vulnerability into an object of consumption.
By intentionally blurring the lines between authenticity and artifice, I question my own position: to what extent does performing marginality participate in the same dynamics of objectification I aim to critique? The work holds space for this discomfort, inviting reflection on the ethics of representation and the complex interplay of seeing and being seen within global cultural economies.
Video produced in collaboration with Nelson Vergara.
