When nothing happens, creativity begins: inner creative rupture and tourist creativity in a rural satellite destination

Cultural and creative tourism research has largely explained tourist creativity through designed offerings, participation, and co-created activities. Yet less is known about how creativity emerges when creative programming is reduced, suspended, or absent. Drawing on posthuman autoethnography, this study examines three solo journeys from Ho Chi Minh City to Thiềng Liềng Islet, a rural satellite destination in Vietnam. The findings show that tourist creativity emerged through experiential rupture, constituted by spatio-temporal, sensory, and relational ruptures. These ruptures generated experiential suspension, enabling inner attention, reflective incubation, and situated meaning-making. The study develops the Inner Creative Rupture Framework, which explains tourist creativity as an emergent process shaped by absence, slowness, community micro-creativity, and more-than-human co-production. Theoretically, the framework shifts creative tourism from offering-based to condition-based explanation. Practically, it positions rural satellites as infrastructures for reflective creativity. The findings invite broader reconsideration of absence, silence, and slowness as generative conditions in tourism.