TURICOM, an acronym for The Tourist Experience: Image, Body and Death in the Culture of Leisure [La experiencia turística: Imagen, Cuerpo y Muerte en la cultura del ocio], is an inter-university research group based at the University of La Laguna with members at the Spanish Universities Jaume I, Castilla-La Mancha, Miguel Hernández, along with Goldsmiths (UK) and Marquette (USA). Its subject of study is a reflection on new practices of leisure and consumption from an aesthetic, anthropological and cultural perspective. Tourism constitutes the most significant paradigm of these practices. Beyond its strictly commercial facet, it is one of the main models for understanding social behavior in late modernity. In this sense, the material and rhetorical dispositives through which tourism programs consumer experiences cannot be divorced from those used by contemporary art and visual culture in general.

Our approach is openly transdiciplinary, with researchers from anthropology, art history, aesthetics, history of cinema and photography, language and literature, architecture and artistic practices. We collaborate with various artistic institutions such as MNCARS (Madrid), IVAM (Valencia), TEA (Tenerife) or CACT (Lanzarote), as well as with  Concreta Publishers (Valencia). We are open to the collaboration of anyone who does not fall for the illusions of the tourist industry nor is put off by its manifest banality.

Coordinator: José Díaz Cuyás

Within this research framework, we are developing the project La modernidad paradójica: experiencia artística y turística en la España desarrollista (1959-1975) [Paradoxical modernity: artistic and touristic experience in Spain during the economic boom of 1959-1975] PGC2018-093422-B-I00. Co-directed by José Díaz Cuyás (ULL) and Vicente Benet (UJI).