Tourism through local eyes
Art as a catalyst for dialogue in Faro and Lesbos to address overtourism

From the idea of a poetic map for the island of Lesbos to an arthropod sculpture for the city of Faro: the BlueTour project demonstrates that art can foster a more intimate and authentic relationship between residents and visitors in the same regions
Lesbos is a Mediterranean island located in the northeastern Aegean Sea, opposite the coast of the Anatolian peninsula. Faro is the capital of the Algarve region in southern Portugal, washed by the Atlantic Ocean. Both coastal areas share the impact of divisive tourism that leads to social marginalisation and a loss of authenticity, but also a desire to restart by involving the voices their inhabitants—by far absent from tourism planning strategies—to recover the memory and identity of these territories.
How can art offer a different perspective on tourism that is both affecting and dividing? How can we create alternative tourist routes that are also inclusive?
The impact of tourism in Faro and Lesbos
According to the research Over Tourism: Impact and Possible Policy Responses1 by the Transport and Tourism Commission of the European Parliament (TRAN), tourism has a social, economic, and environmental impact on cities, especially in coastal areas and islands. Its uncontrolled and exponential growth is causing significant damage to landscapes, with coastal degradation, the loss of natural habitats for species, and the deterioration of freshwater quality due to inadequate solid waste management. Of the total 46,000 km of European coastline, 25,000 km have already exceeded the critical limit beyond which the living conditions of residents have worsened, especially in the summer.
«The Algarve has about 500,000 inhabitants in winter, while in summer we reach 15 million people: one million more tourists without the necessary infrastructure to accommodate them and without suitable cultural services. Menus are in four languages2, but there isn’t even a single art museum in the whole region. All of this is sterile and extremely sad. I decided to join the project to change this state of affairs», says André Silvia Sancho, one of the three artists involved in European BlueTour project to create artworks – that will be presented to the public in the autumn of 2024 -starting from the demands of people living in Faro and Lesbos3. The project is curated by the cultural organisation Sineglossa4 in partnership with the LATRA association of Lesbos and the municipality of Faro, co-financed by the European Union’s Creative Europe programmer.

André Silva Sancho studied Product Design at the School of Arts and Design in Callas DA Raina and moves between product design and the art world. In 2020 with the BLOWPLASTIC project, he gained the interest of the Rossana Orlandi Gallery in Milan, where he was part of the FUORISALONE circuit in 2020.
Discover moreSancho is working on producing an artwork for the territory of Faro, starting from listening to its inhabitants. «Locals feel the heavy overflow of tourists during the summer which makes it really hard to navigate the city downtown», Sancho explains. The residents of Algarve are, indeed, disappointed because some of their cities have been heavily transformed—almost desecrated—to cater to the tastes and whims of tourists, which have nothing to do with the territory’s identity. A glaring example is in the culinary culture: steakhouses, pizzerias, and kebab shops are replacing traditional cuisine based on seafood.
This results in a friction between those who inhabit and those who visit the territories: the arrival of tourists is perceived, if not with hostility, then with scepticism by local communities who, cut off from tourism promotion and development strategies, cannot express their voice on how the places they hold dear should be experienced and cared for.

Paolo Lolicata was born and raised in Sicily, where he took his first steps into the arts through theatre. He studied Performing Arts in Rome and graduated from DAMS. In 2010, he moved to Australia, driven by the desire to explore other paths in his creative journey through acting, curating, fashion and graphic design. He collaborates as an independent curator at Paratissima ArtFair in Turin, where, in 2019, with “Human Touch”, he won the Nice Price for the best curatorial project. Photo credit: Serena Vittorini
Discover moreThree thousand kilometres away from Faro there is Lesbos «in the past chose to invest in education with the opening of the University of the Aegean rather than tourism and the development of hospitality infrastructure», says Paolo Lolicata, the second artist involved in Bluetour project, that is instead working on producing an artwork for the Mediterrean island.
«There is a strong resistance from the population to the approaching tourism transformation and one of the most interesting things I heard was this plea: “Don’t promote the island: we’re fine as we are”» Lolicata recalls. «The inhabitants want to keep the island authentic, welcoming only those who can care for it because the island maintains a fragile balance between migration and militarisation». Lesbos is indeed on one of the main migratory routes from Turkey to Europe and is on the front line regarding the impact of EU policies on managing the phenomenon. With migrants and tourists, listening to citizens becomes urgent.
Lesbos: the poetry island
«I often find myself travelling with a mindset different from that of the classic tourist. I stay in a place for at least a month» Lolicata shares, who spent forty days in Lesbos from April to mid-May 2024—well beyond the period foreseen by the project—during his artistic residency. «I stay in places where I can interact with my hosts and receive advice on a different path within the territory. Being in the territory alone is an adventure that necessarily leads you to create new relationships with the inhabitants, and it is the key to experiencing the island intimately in a continuous creative and dialogue journey».For the first ten days, Lolicata stayed at the Hermitage Sykamineas5, an eco-retreat founded by German artist Andreas Sell and located near the beach of Skala Sykamineas, in the north of Lesbo. «Through Sell, I formed relationships with shepherds and fishermen in the island’s north, discovering secret places like the natural hot springs of Eftalou. Here, the old caretaker died about ten years ago, and the Municipality of Lesbos had decided to close the place pending a tender, but the population rebelled. Since then, the Pan-Hellenic Ottoman-style thermal bath has been a self-managed place where the island’s different souls coexist—the locals, the LGTBQ+ community, the shepherd, the Turkish tourist, the yoga teacher, the army soldier in a kind of small, evolving community», says Lolicata, where there are those who clean, those who feed the cats, and those who cook.
«This was one of the first places I discovered in Lesbos thanks to the interaction with its inhabitants, and it became my benchmark for choosing all the other places I visited6 and will tell about in the project’s artistic output». These are inclusive places linked to water and poetry: «an intertwining present in much of the island’s literature but which has been lost», Lolicata explains. «Becoming aware of the poetry of Lesbos is urgent to take on both its magic and its dramas».
Lesbos is an island that repels and calls back, where the movement of the waves is a metaphor for a broken relationship.
7«Where there used to be communication between the coasts, there is now the separation and suffering of migration», Lolicata says. «There is the trauma of the passage, from the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922 to the stories of contemporary migrants, and the migrants’ stories are so strong that you either ignore them, pretending to simplify the territory like a turist in search of light-hearted entertainment, or you decide to look, listen and feel those around you and, in this case, only poetry can help you reframe their stories». The artist thus thought of composing as artwork a poetic guide to the island, made up of the poems of Sappho, Alcaeus, and Stratis Myrivilis, Odysseas Elytīs and other writers from Lesbos, drawings of some of the people who accompanied him during his explorations, and photographs of his travels. The goal is to reach both the island’s residents and those who come there: a starting point to understand it without rationalising or objectifying it.
«On Skala Sykamineas beach, Benito started painting with brush and canvas», says the artist. In his research journey, Lolicata experimented with various artistic practices: writing poems in Greek, soaking them in the waters of the Lesbos sea, and drying them on the Apelli beach; recovering concepts from archaeology by collecting fragments of various kinds (audio, 3D scans, urban waste, rocks, plants, etc.), designing a collective storytelling workshop with 15 inhabitants to create stories starting from those same fragments8. But the co-creation performance on the beach of Mytilene with Benito Luzaya, a Congolese artist living in Lesbos, gave him the plastic representation of the project’s meaning. «We were on a small beach», he emphasises, «but the reaction was enormous, giving goosebumps. Everyone came to talk to him: first the elderly Greeks, then the volunteers and tourists, and finally also the Roma community, in a process of transforming the place and those experiencing it at that moment through art. The brush and canvas generated curiosity, openness, creating an element of contact. In Benito, I saw the emotion of repositioning himself within Lesbos as an inhabitant, which is what this project asks us to achieve».
Faro: the arthopod city
André Silva Sancho describes Faro as «a very welcoming city».
The inhabitants would like people who visit to be able to sit next to them and talk together.
«They are friendly people, but they would prefer to make known what is valuable about the area from their point of view and not that of the tourist». The point is to understand which direction to go because Faro has «untapped growth potential, and we must ask: “What change does Faro need to be not only more authentic but also more inclusive?”» That is, how can a city be experienced by everyone who passes through without becoming homogenised?
During the BlueTour project, Sancho met with ACAPO – Associação dos Cegos e Amblíopes de Portugal, the Portuguese association for blind and visually impaired people, in a specific focus group. «This meeting made me more aware of the perception of a visually impaired person, an aspect I had never addressed with such clarity. I understood the limitations in accessing cultural sites in Faro and the difficulties in seemingly simple actions like going to the beach or entering the water when there are no specific guides or floats».
This is also where the idea of an arthropod sculpture as second artwork fot the city originated. «Arthropods like crabs, lobsters, and some species of shrimp are marine invertebrates with a protective shell, known as an exoskeleton, which, being external, cannot expand in line with the body’s growth in size and width» explains Sancho. Therefore, all arthropods periodically undergo moulting, where the existing exoskeleton is replaced with a new one. The shell is necessary at a specific stage of their life but later becomes a cage, and Faro, for Sancho, is metaphorically called to a similar event. «In the old shell of Faro, there are deficiencies in the accessibility of places, whether cultural sites or recreational areas like beaches »Sancho explains. «But also as the lack of involvement of residents in tourism planning and the loss of what is authentic. Abandoning the current tourist and cultural approach—a shell that no longer protects but hinders—means acknowledging its limitations to overcome them, exposing oneself to difficulties, confronting them, and growing».
The shell, four metres wide, five metres long, and seven metres high, will be made of symmetrical and pointed square steel tubes resembling a shell and the square shape of the city. All around, the sculpture will have a different texture, serving as a guide for visually impaired people, who will be able to appreciate it through a Braille explanation and a miniature reproduction for tactile use. The arthropod sculpture will be placed in the Passeio Ribeirinho city park, away from the city centre and mass tourism, in a location that has remained isolated because it lacks direct roads or infrastructure. The park is close to the sea, and the shape of the installation will evoke it, while the shell’s colour «will be rusty», says Sancho, «like something that has degraded in the environment because the necessary change is already happening».
- For the research on overtourism, see Peeters, P., Gössling, S., Klijs, J., Milano, C., Novelli, M., Dijkmans, C., Eijgelaar, E., Hartman, S., Heslinga, J., Isaac, R., Mitas, O., Moretti, S., Nawijn, J., Papp, B. and Postma, A., (2018). Research for TRAN Committee – Overtourism: impact and possible policy responses, European Parliament, Policy Department for Structural and Cohesion Policies, Brussels https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2018/629184/IPOL_STU(2018)629184_EN.pdf ↩︎
- The four menu languages: German, French, English and Spanish ↩︎
- The project also includes a similar community project in Ancona, with artist Eugenio Tibaldi, to create a work of art that investigates the relationship between inhabitants and territory The artwork will be presented in September 2024. ↩︎
- Sineglossa’s official website: https://sineglossa.it/ ↩︎
- The official website of the Hermitage Sykamineas eco retreat: https://www.hermitage-sykaminea.org ↩︎
- One of the itineraries Paolo Lolicata followed and which will be present in the poetic map is the one around the Castle of Mytilene and is composed as follows: Statue of Sappho in Sappho Square, Statue of Liberty – (Donated by emigrants to America), The Great Cross – Apelli Beach, Agiasma (Holy Water) – Agios Ioannis Prodromos Church, Panagia Galatousa, Hamam, The refugee Mother – Statue ↩︎
- The term Asia Minor catastrophe refers to three events that are fundamental to contemporary Greek history. The defeat of the Greek army in Asia Minor during the Greco-Turkish war, the emblematic destruction of the city of Smyrna, and the abandonment of Asia Minor by the thousand-year-old Greek communities present in the area uninterruptedly since the 11th century BC. These events as a whole are considered by the Greeks not as a mere concatenation of historical facts but as a national drama ↩︎
- For the video diary chronicling the Fragments of Lesbos workshop, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mD9oI4_Jhs ↩︎