An artist's book that renews the genre of the
travel guide.
The result of a joint-venture with the journal Provence, this pocket-size book with a summery peach cover presents a tightly edited, discreetly packaged list of the best a city like Nice – “the California of Europe” – has to offer the art-conscious traveler.
Whether you are staying for 48 hours or five days, visiting for business or a vacation, the editors of Provence—Tobias Kaspar and Loichinger—have done the hard work for you: reading from more than 43 travel guides, from 1885 up to 2010, and comparing their merits and insider's tips, they've found you the most extraordinary and enticing restaurants, bars, hotels, stores and sites, architecture and design. This full-color guide also presents a series of original photographs that compose a contemporary portrait of the intoxicating city of Jacques Médecin and Yves Klein, Hôtel Negresco and the Promenade des Anglais.
Thanks to this historical, if whimsical, approach, The Provence City Guide: Nice renews the genre of the travel guide: one of the more performative sort of books, usually considered as trustworthy, such a manual not only pretends to tell you what the present is like, but also how to experience it. This small volume is undoubtly stylish, but anachronically informative and probably not very precise; it allows one to lose her or his way, and will nonetheless provide its readers with a real taste of the city's landscape and (in)famous history, and the satisfaction you've not read yet all that you could see.
Tobias Kaspar (born in 1984) is a Swiss artist currently living and working in Rome. His work has been exhibited at
Silberkuppe in Berlin, Marcelle Alix in Paris, and Peter Kilchmann in Zurich. He recently participated in
So Machen Wir Es at the Kunsthaus Bregenz,
Based in Berlin at the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, and
Human Valley at the Zurich Kunsthalle.
Hannes Loichinger is an art critic and independant curator. In 2009, he co-founded the magazine
Provence with
Tobias Kaspar.
