British artist Bill Aitchison, himself a visitor to Melbourne, guides each group around the city and describes different tours that inscribe their various narratives onto the places stopped at. Each tour ends with a convivial open conversation in a cafe. The work draws attention to both the city itself and the wider potential of the tourist gaze. In doing so, it opens up questions of globalisation, the meaning of these exchanges between local and visitor, and how we use and give identity to places. It draws out the inherent politics, both local and global, of describing the city, and collages radically divergent narratives, such as conventional self-serving histories with sex tourism, protest marches, and artist projects.

The Tour Of All Tours brings visitor and local into the same frame as equals. It achieves this by focusing upon the experience of taking tours in the city and looking at what the different tours do and don’t tell you about it. Aitchison has presented versions of the project in cities around the world, including Stuttgart, London, Beijing and Amsterdam.

Aitchison reforms the guided tour into an engaging and truly unique medium for art outside of the institution and in the public sphere… For 90 minutes, Aitchison interrupts and utilises this stage to show us, the audience, the layers of branding, expectations and reality of which it is comprised. Aitchison’s quirky and peculiar mix of disclosure and captivating storytelling offers fun and enlightenment (Time Out, Beijing).

With this broad definition that stresses connections more than differences, I will look at the project and highlight the issue of mobility. As the project is a guided tour of guided tours, it necessarily deals with mobility and does so in two obvious way: it considers both the mobility of tourists and the mobility of tour formats, that is to say what and how visitors project onto locations, and how in turn the location makes itself know to visitors.

I will then consider the mobility of the project itself. I will compare and contrast the creation and reception of The Tour of All Tours in different locations, including Melbourne. I will attempt to show how, in choosing to spotlight the interaction of host and visitor as a site of performance, these works invariably become political. I will describe how each tour I have made so far has uncovered a set of themes specific to its location, which I was unable to fully predict prior to making the work. Indeed, it is usually the unintended meta-narratives that emerge as a result of taking tours that I am most interested in and which, I will argue, finally give the most revealing portrait of a place.