“Superhost”

In a totally overtouristed ecosystem as the one in Apulia, SUPERHOST adopts camouflage as an ironic/critical hypothesis of resistance, embracing a post-identitarian logic. It is a transient figure, a liminal zone between hospitality and hostility, between the real and the fictitious—embodying what Baudrillard called the purest logic of simulation: not a copy of the real, but its erasure through an excess of signs.
SUPERHOST is a real/fake Airbnb that manifests through a dissolved identity in a state of permanent metamorphosis, a relational device shaped by the flows of algorithms and reviews, operating according to a Deleuzian rhizomatic model. In this dissolution of identity within the mesh of desires and touristic expectations, a kind of environmental performativity emerges, echoing the figure of the cyborg: neither nature nor culture, neither host nor guest, but interface.
Surfacing as a complex system of presentation strategies (of self, of the neighbor) and of representation (of the self, of the other), SUPERHOST acts through forces that redefine, reorganize, and re-express the forms of the visible. It is a contaminated aesthetic zone, a living ready-made, a mise en abyme of the platform itself. From this perspective, representation becomes a cultural prosthesis, and the self dissolves into its communicational avatar.
The perception and interpretation of SUPERHOST have nothing to do with truth or falsity; here, spectacle replaces reality. Within this space, signs do not need to be true or false—only effective. What matters is the credibility of the simulacrum, the performative power of the gesture. Tourism has become a technology of the self, a self-branding practice immersed in the regimes of visibility, activating micropolitics of the gaze, belief systems, and suspicion.
Staging reaffirms the persistence of doubt, of a duo-habere: the impossibility of arriving at a single, stable observational truth, keeping both poles of the true/false dyad alive. It is the aesthetic of functional ambiguity, embedded in the heart of the attention economy, where doubt becomes exchange value.
The gaze, as an interactive filter between truth and fiction, connects to theories of sightseeing as a social construction of perception, where the tourist experience (or that of the contemporary consumer more broadly) is fundamentally altered by being pre-selected and pre-packaged into shareable, sellable experience bundles—reduced to a string of Instagrammable images.
Overtourism is not only a saturation of space; it is a colonial seizure of the imaginary. It does not merely invade places—it redefines the forms of the visible, the expected, the livable. It is a mythopoetic machine that dismembers otherness into icons and reassembles it into shareable glimpses, as experience dissolves into the optical ritual of photogeneity. Every place becomes a backdrop: we do not travel to discover, but to confirm what we’ve already seen—or rather, scrolled.
Landscape—once lived—is now performativized within the frame. We no longer visit a space, but a format. The locality gives way to its abstraction: a theme park of authenticity, a docile simulation of the exotic, packaged to reassure rather than disturb. A realism without reality.
It is the Disneyfication of alterity: the world turned decoration.
But the damage is not only semiotic. There is an ongoing ecocide, masked by the sepia-toned filters of lifestyle: water and material consumption, soil erosion, intermittent urbanization, hyperproduction of energy. To this, we must add social expropriation: urban centers change function, residents become extras for the day, or are expelled beyond the index finger of the tourist map, beyond the margins of the desirable.
Authenticity is no longer lived: it is produced, coded, staged. A symbolic object among others, part of a performative choreography tailored for the algorithm and capital. What was once lived is now consumed. Space becomes a continuous-flow spectacle: “visibility without experience”.
Thus, environmental injustice entwines with social injustice. Those who suffer the phenomenon are never those who desire it, nor those who profit from it. The margins expand while the center is saturated. “Authentic destinations” become symbolic reserves of capital, geopolitical stages where inequality wears the mask of accessibility, where mobility is illusory and freedom becomes a premium service.
At its core, mass tourism is the offspring of late biocapitalism—an industry of normative imagination that seizes even liberated time. Travel too is absorbed into the logic of production: scheduled, booked, calculated, hyper-curated. Desire is turned into a package.
We no longer travel to get lost, but to update our identity.
Escapism is already forecast, planned, pre-lived. The tourist is no longer a subject: they are interpassive—delegating the task of living to others: influencers, agencies, AI. Their presence is pure visual rhetoric, an algorithmic shadow in someone else’s feed. A semi-absent figure, oscillating between emulation and consumption, between shared presence and experiential absence.

Tourism—in its current form—does not liberate; it anesthetizes.
And SUPERHOST, as a counter-device, ironizes, disarticulates, sabotages.
It restores ambiguity to the sign, and background noise to the place.
In its permanent disguise, SUPERHOST does not aim to represent:
it dissolves, multiplies, vanishes.
It is an epiphany of the threshold—a semiotics of the uninhabitable.
A mimetic infection. A threshold that watches us.
An algorithm that lies to survive.

Mass tourism is a problem that does not arise solely from numbers, but from a shared imagination: this is how social media and viral content have redrawn the maps of tourist desire. What makes it problematic is not the excess of bodies in places, but the uniformity of the desires that move them. We travel by following invisible coordinates, traced by algorithms and viral mechanisms of visibility. These new maps of desire no longer emerge from encounters with the unknown, but from the compulsive repetition of the identical: same shots, same frames, same sunsets.
Thus, the promise of travel as a unique experience is reversed into its opposite: a collective ritual of content production, where the world becomes a backdrop for the personal brand. Instagram and TikTok are no longer just showcases, but performative devices that colonize the imagination even before the destination itself. We no longer travel to see, but to be seen.
In this landscape, the contemporary tourist does not explore—they confirm. They do not discover—they archive. The landscape loses its alterity and becomes a surface to capture, optimize, and post. The horizon narrows: we no longer travel to get lost, but to prove we’ve been there.
In the end, the unsettling question remains: do we still travel to live an experience—or only to simulate one?

When tourism becomes a mass phenomenon, the essential element of travel becomes vision: that which must be seen, filtered, ranked with one, two, or three stars according to symbolic value. Experience becomes retroactive: validated only if recognizable. The map precedes the territory, and every detour is already anticipated by the algorithm.
The dominance of vision, the translation of objects into images and their normalization, feeds back upon the objects themselves—reducing them to museums, botanical gardens, zoos, or amusement parks. This is the aestheticization of reality: everything becomes surface, display, mise-en-scène. Like a shop window, things to be seen undergo a capitalist transformation: decontextualized, turned into autonomous objects of cultural consumption, sold as certified experiences.

SUPERHOST explores inauthenticity as both aesthetic and political horizon. The world is not fake—the way we access it is. The tourist does not see things, but their own performance; not reality, but its emotional rendering. The image is the new real, and authenticity manifests only as a simulation of itself.

Spatial articulation, shaped by the anxiety of the plausible and the iconic, takes the form of signs of signs—emotional metadata informing every space. What is experienced is no longer the place, but its reflection in the system of shared aesthetic beliefs.
Seduction replaces persuasion. Desire is induced, performed, coded. The sign is made to lie. But in a world where truth is no longer useful, lying becomes a survival strategy.
Seduction replaces persuasion. The sign is made to lie!

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