A defining feature of the current society is how we spend the vacation time. Travelling has become a popular hedonistic practice for escaping the environment of the everyday life. This temporary respite has been interpreted by scholars as a metaphorical pilgrimage. Under this analogy, the tourist becomes a ‘secular pilgrim’ questing for a no-quotidian experience and seeking a punctuation mark in his/her biography. This recreational demand is echoed by the tourism industry that includes in its holiday packages sacred routes -like Camino de Santiago in Spain and S:t Olavsleden in Sweden-Norway- and secular modern pilgrimages -like Elvis Presley’s grave at Graceland or ‘Trees for Life Day‘ in Flevoland-.
‘Apostlahästar på Gotland‘ is an explorational art project that aims to reflect a contemporary flow of leisure by inverting the terms: what happens if an inward-oriented journey is created for a well-known touristic site? The methodology used to reach this ‘ritual path’ is to create a walking route using the 93 Medieval churches of Gotland as path-markers. Every ritual follows a narrative structure, based on ancestral symbols of Gotland. The route will be inspired by trojaborg labyrinth and the local iconography of neolithic, viking and Medieval culture.
Using my art practice as an embodiment of metaphors, Gotland is an isolated piece of land surrounded by water, just as a space of leisure – or a temporary gap – is enclosed by everyday life. Walking in a labyrinth path becomes a modern transcendental journey and a reflection of human behaviour in the shifting world in which we live.