Document:Q10286

The piece works around issues of representation of foreign places. We constructed a single journey based on many others that we have undertaken and photographed.
By omitting geographical references we open the possibility of the viewer guessing and searching for familiarity or possible identification; the images are placed as triggers for curiosity, and it is left to the audience to discover where they come from.
The photographs are placed with a soundtrack. In this case we allude to similarities of tone of found texts from travel guides and tourist guides that seemed to take us to the same homogeneous place. Luring the traveler to the foreign, selling the idea of the exotic, to make sure he/she gets there, but always making sure to caution about the dangers implicit in the unfamiliar other.
This work is a commission from the Institute of International Visual Arts (InIVA, UK), as part of the Travellers' Tales project (website design by Hyperkit), in which eight international artists were invited to make a piece of work inspired by the experience of a journey, real or imagined.
http://www.travellers-tales.org/