Overtourism as a worrying tide: A rhythmanalytic experiment on venetian everyday life

The essay opens by assuming that the most worrying tide in Venice is not the acqua granda but that of overtourism that intoxicates and degrades the city. This phenomenon is now so deeply rooted in the city’s life that the idea of contrasting such a fixed situation appears far distant from any urban governance and any public policy. The essay hypothesizes that the only way to try to reverse this trend is to consider more carefully the capability of Venetian inhabitants to produce a collective attitude to change the representation of the own body’s self with respect to space. This applies both to residents and – in a mirror-like way – to tourists. In the first part, the essay constructs his rhythmanalytic toolbox using the categories of “carnal body” and “total body” together with the concepts of etic and emicrepresentations that are typical of cultural anthropology. The intention is to build an analytical tool capable of detecting «the problem» of everyday life in the lagoon city: that of being entirely impregnated by an institutional fabric that involves consensus, adherence, commitment and integration to the touristic-commercial show business. In the second part, the essay theoretically systematizes the rhythmanalytic toolbox to be used for the analysis of everyday life in Venice. The intent is to create a dialectical synthesis between the emic end etic representations of the Venetian carnal/total body. What makes the problem particularly acute in Venice does not arise in terms of the prevalence of one of the two bodies (the bodies of tourists are suffocating those of residents), but in the coexistence of both representations in each individual Venetian carnal/total body. In the third part, the essay empirically puts to work the rhythmanalytic toolbox using the popular (in Venice) web series Rugagiuffa. Movies gives us the opportunity – in a slightly but effective way – to get an idea of how these two representations live together in a conflictual way in the bodies of the Venetians. The comic (but bitter) stories represented through the bodies of the protagonists of Rugagiuffa, are effective metaphors about the ability of the tourist monoculture to appropriate itself at various levels of everyday life and of the relationship between residents. The conclusions of the essay try to describe how the etic body of the tourist, like a parasite, proves capable of grafting into the emic body of the resident and infect him from within, bending him to behaviours and rhythms that are typical of the tourist monoculture and that reverberate up to the most hidden meanders of his everyday life.