Topological encounters: Marketing landscapes for tourists

This chapter deals with landscapes and the ways in which they are presented to and encountered by tourists visiting Iceland, and in land-use controversies surrounding tourism development. The aim of the chapter is to show how wilderness and natural landscapes in Iceland are given voice and agency, enabling them encounters with the visiting tourist. However, the work that goes into giving wilderness landscapes a voice in marketing and promotion entails the exertion of force upon the earth, moulding its surface into marketable form. In order to make sense of this force this chapter draws conceptually on topological imaginaries as presented in literature on cultural topologies and vitalist geo-philosophy as outlined in the work of Gilles Deleuze and those who have elaborated thereupon (see Protevi and Bonta, 2004). With concepts and tools developed through these two theoretical strands landscapes emerge as a malleable continuous surface at one with us and the earth, taking on different forms as it enters e.g. marketing media. The forces exerted to produce the different forms of landscapes become the focus of the analysis as it is through these forces that a malleable continuous surface takes shape. The wellspring of this force is the demand for marketability and the generation of surplus in modern capitalist experience economy. This charges a potential landscape encounter with controversies that the chapter seeks to unravel through two examples provided.