New wilderness on the ruins of soviet infrastructures

The Ob River water tourist route can hardly be called one of the gems of eco-tourism and nature tourism in Siberia. The Lena and Yenisei rivers are being toured by many companies, while the Ob remains an untapped destination. The transport infrastructures, the roads along the river banks, and the airports have been in a state of decay since 1995 when most logging and fishing enterprises closed. Isolation and inaccessibility are therefore challenges that are faced in different ways by visitors to the region, researchers and individual tourists, as well as locals themselves.

The project focuses on ways of promoting the landscape and the historical and natural resources of this micro-region as a tourist ‘commodity’ product' and an opportunity for an 'experience of immersion' into the wild life. In this context, the phenomenological and rhetorical tension between the processes of ruinization and rewilding is particularly important.

The project includes several stories or case studies that explore mosaic practices on the banks of the Ob River that claim to be pioneering in the field of tourism. The most striking case study is the Remix river cruise ship, which has targeted exclusively foreign tourists before the pandemic and, thus, reflects the rhetorical and symbolic distance that exists between the way wilderness is presented to Russian and foreign visitors. The flip side of glamourous tours for foreigners are tours for Russian urban fishermen, who use the same infrastructure, the same ship, but in different seasons and for a different purpose, namely to combine resource extraction (fishing) and the real pleasure of immersion into wild unspoilt nature, and an escape from big cities.

The metaphor of tourism not as observation (sighting) but as "touching" and encountering is distorted in cases such as selling guided tours to dens dens for bear hunting in winter, or organising commercial fishing. Too close interaction with nature would seem to be no longer one of observation and contemplation. However, if one looks at the tourism business as an "event" and experience market, then customised hunting takes on new meanings.

Against this background, I am interested in what do local communities think about the prospect of tourism development, and do they see an opportunity to do so at all? The first line of reflection touches on poaching as one of the few ways to make money in the area after the decline of logging and fishing industries. In this case, tourism appears as a new source of transparency: the development of transport infrastructures, the presence of foreigners in the region presupposes the strengthening of inspection and police control. Stricter control calls into question the fishery itself, which cannot continue at the same level as before, when the villages were remote and difficult to access. Thus, development of tourist routes is a source of vulnerability for the fishermen and their families.

The second line of reflection questions the possible roles that local people could play in this kind of tourism, which depends very much on the absence of the human element (to create the illusion of wilderness and intactness) rather than engaging local communities as partners and staff.

This project is based on years of observation of local people's practices in the region, expert interviews, informal conversations with local hunting and fishing professionals, inspectors, their family members, local historians and heads of villages. The empirical challenge of the study is to try to see and record the invisible or elusive forms of tourism, as in contrast to the more conventional and familiar forms that we are used seeing in more accessible and well-known tourist destinations.