Tourists Welcome

2007

Staged within Slovenia’s only international airport at the moment of the country’s entry into the Schengen Area, Tourists Welcome transforms obsolete tourism slogans from vanished states into a meditation on borders, mobility, and failed geopolitical imaginaries.

Tourists Welcome (Awaken to a Different World)

Tourists Welcome is a site-specific installation conceived for the newly reconstructed terminal of Ljubljana Jože Pučnik Airport in 2007, at the moment of Slovenia’s entry into the Schengen Area. Developed during a period in which borders within much of Europe were being symbolically dissolved while simultaneously reinforced elsewhere, the work examines the airport as a threshold space where national identity, mobility, hospitality, and geopolitical aspiration are staged through architecture and visual language.

Installed throughout the terminal’s waiting areas, the work consisted of a series of neon signs displaying historical tourism slogans previously used by states, territories, and political entities that had either ceased to exist or become inaccessible through war, political collapse, or shifting borders. Removed from their original contexts and suspended within the aspirational architecture of the airport, these slogans appeared simultaneously seductive and spectral—linguistic remnants of failed political imaginaries, interrupted promises of openness, and projected futures that never fully materialised.

Presented at the precise moment Slovenia entered a new geopolitical condition of border permeability within Europe, Tourists Welcome foregrounded the instability underlying the language of international access and freedom of movement. The work positioned the airport not simply as infrastructure, but as a scenographic apparatus through which states narrate belonging, regulate visibility, and construct emotional relationships to territory. In this context, the terminal became a site where utopian narratives of mobility coexisted with the memory of vanished states, fractured geographies, and politically contingent borders.

By bringing together obsolete tourism rhetoric and the architecture of contemporary transit, Cibic transformed the airport into a speculative archive of geopolitical desire. The installation reflects on tourism slogans as instruments of soft power: condensed ideological statements through which territories attempt to aestheticise themselves into sites of collective aspiration, hospitality, and international recognition. Detached from the political entities that produced them, the slogans instead reveal the fragility of the national and transnational projects they once promoted.

Works

*Tourists Welcome (Beyond Your Dreams)*

2007

*Tourists Welcome (Everything Under the Sun)*

2007

*Tourists Welcome (Its Good Being First)*

2007

*Tourists Welcome (Share the Wonder)*

2007

*Tourists Welcome (Stay Just a Little Bit Longer)*

2007

*Tourists Welcome (There Is Only One)*

2007

*Tourists Welcome (Things Look Different Here)*

*Tourists Welcome (We Love Dreamers)*

2007

*Tourists Welcome (You’ve Arrived)*

2007

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Publications

Petja Grafenauer The beauty of ideology 2013

Download (PDF, 93 KB): The beauty of ideology

Simona Vidmar Airport Projects / Interview, monograph publication Airport Projects, published by UGM Gallery Maribor 2009

The interview between Jasmina Cibic and curator Simona Vidmar reflects on Cibic’s Airport Projects, a long-term body of work situated in airports as “non-places” defined by anonymity, transit, and suspended identity. The conversation explores how these spaces allow the artist to stage interventions that question the construction of experience, authority, and spectatorship, shifting the viewer from a traditional museum audience into roles such as tourist, passer-by, or participant. Cibic discusses her use of performative actions, delegated authorship, and fictionalised narratives to fabricate new experiences rather than simply represent reality, while also addressing how artworks transform when translated from site-specific contexts into documentation or exhibition formats.

The interview was published as part of Jasmina Cibic’s broader Airport Projects research and accompanying publication, which brings together her investigations into airports as ideological and experiential frameworks, examining how globalised spaces shape perception, identity, and the politics of viewing.

Simona Vidmar Spectators, Tourists and Casual Passers-by, Oris no. 58, Zagreb 2009

This essay examines Jasmina Cibic’s early artistic practice through a series of performative interventions and staged environments realised in spaces such as airports, tourist sites, zoos, and exhibition architectures. Focusing on projects including Everybody for Safari (2005), Dictionary of Imaginary Places, Tourists Welcome, and Ideologies of Display, the text traces the emergence of Cibic’s long-standing interest in spectatorship, tourism, systems of display, and the ideological choreography of public space.

The essay positions Cibic’s early works as investigations into how environments associated with travel, consumption, and leisure construct desire and collective imagination. By inserting fictional destinations into airport information systems, staging performances within airport terminals, or transforming exhibition spaces into scenographic constructions, Cibic exposes the mechanisms through which spectacle, aspiration, and authority are aestheticised and normalised.

Particular emphasis is placed on the artist’s use of highly controlled visual languages borrowed from advertising, tourism, and late capitalism. Rather than critiquing these systems from a distance, Cibic reenacts and subtly destabilises them through fictional interventions, performative gestures, and staged “souvenirs” of experience.

The essay identifies these early projects as foundational to Cibic’s later practice, establishing methodologies that continue throughout her work: the use of architecture, scenography, performance, and historical reference to interrogate how political, cultural, and ideological identities are constructed and performed.