A crowded aisle, blazing sun and fresh ice cream just waiting to be devoured. It sounds too good to be true. In Nice, street artist Toolate has installed three “tourist fags” in several corners of the city. “I hope to be able to eliminate as many pests as possible by the end of the year”, tweets the Banksy from Nice. Behind this hint of humour, the project actually denounces a much more serious problem: overtourism in the region. “To reduce mass tourism on the Côte d’Azur, I installed tourist traps”, writes the artist on his Twitter account.
The choice of Nice for its facilities is easily explained. In 2022, the Baie des Anges became one of the main tourist destinations in France with nearly 7 million visitors, compared to 5 million before covid in 2019. “The Mediterranean is the first victim. Not to mention the pollution, the overconsumption of water, the lack of housing for the locals. The list is long. And the extension of Nice airport will not help matters. This project is a real climate bomb”, reports Toolate to Nice-Matin.
Instead of the piece of cheese, an ice cream cone seemed more appropriate to catch its prey. “So I had a click, jokes the artist with Ouest-France. I noticed that tourists could spend an hour in a queue to buy an ice cream cone. I thought it would be easy to catch them with this kind of bait. The accustomed to provocation thereby wishes to “point the finger at human bullshit” with his installations entitled Tourist trap. In the streets of Nice, the strange wooden trap attracts attention. The walkers stop, intrigued. Some even take a break on the side, the time for a few shots.
The consciousness awakener has been working behind the scenes since the start of the covid-19 pandemic. “I like to deal with subjects with a touch of provocation”, he admits to Ouest-France. It is not his first attempt. Last summer, he had in his sights smokers who throw their cigarette butts on the public highway. To convey his indignation, the artist erected a giant cigarette pack on the Promenade des Anglais. “In collaboration with the Nice Plogging collective, I am happy to present my latest work to you. Here is the work of a bunch of fat c***. To fill this package, 8 hours of collections were necessary for us to collect 10,000 cigarette butts on the Promenade des Anglais”, he denounced on his Instagram account.
The street artist also railed against the working conditions of migrant workers during the 2022 World Cup. For this, he had placed in the streets of Nice a mannequin decorated with a tag “Qatar killed me”. Toolate also painted Hugo Lloris gagged, in reference to the player’s refusal to wear the rainbow armband – in support of the LGBT community – in November 2022. In 2020, the activist organized in Paris, the exhibition of 50 surgical masks abandoned in the streets of the capital to denounce their impact on nature.
