In recent years notions of performance and performativity have become central in tourist studies. Taking its outset in this 'performance turn', this paper explores how theories of performance and performativity better enable us to grasp the interrelationship between tourism and the everyday. While traditional tourism theory and studies tend to presume the unity of place and (cultural) performance fixed within an immobile cartographic space, we want to focus on how tourist destinations are 'hollowed up' as performances are constituted by mobile connections between people and things. Instead of focussing on the relation between performance and representation, we show how tourism cultures are increasingly 'thingified' as tourist objects spin out of control and take on a life of their own. In doing this, tourist performances are constituted. Tourist objects (souvenirs, photo's, goods, guidebooks, novels, media products and so on) circulate, and in their circulation they move and change through transposition, translation and transformation. Drawing on our recent studies of tourist performances at famous tourist sites in Turkey and Egypt as well as 'at home', we argue that tourist sites and places can be constructively conceived of as assemblages of virtual, material and embodied actor-networks, and that we may reconceive performance by introducing notions of materiality, mobility and creativity.