Interscopic fan travelscape: Hybridizing tourism through sport and art

Abstract

Contrary to the common compartmentalization of popular culture and events to specialized forms of fandom-induced tourism (e.g. film-, music-, sport-tourism), event-tourism spaces may also derive from blending different genres that enable symbiotic effects, for example, between sport and art. This paper provides a theoretical analysis of how event-tourism is interwoven and merged with sporting and cinematic popular culture, thereby creating a compound milieu for sport traveling aficionados that we name an “ Interscopic Fan Travelscape” (IFT). To ground our analysis, we use the example of a participatory sport event that blends organically sporting and cinematic facets of popular culture. This is a free-diving event, hosted in the Greek island of Amorgos, and commemorating the 1988 “Big Blue” film, which was primarily shot in Amorgos. Our conceptual framework provides a comprehensive understanding of composite popular culture settings and devoted fan-travel by integrating perspectives of neo-tribalism, serious leisure, fan pilgrimage and event-tourism.