|
The 2009 Theme:
This artists chosen for the 2009
event, created their projects in response to the following
informing statement;
‘It seems to me
that I would always be better of where I am not, and this question
of moving is one of those I discuss incessantly with my soul."
Charles Baudelaire.
In her book
‘Questions of Travel’; Caren Kaplan describes tourism as heralding
the post-modern. ‘It is a product of the rise of consumer culture,
leisure and technological innovation’. She also examines the origins
of what is nostalgia in Western Culture, often born in forced exile
from homeland, family and language. The sense of ‘lack’ felt in many
modern lives is attached to this sense of romanticised exile Kaplan
describes and we attach a permanent label to nostalgic pasts that
were never permanent and this sense of permanence we transfer to
future imagined destinations that will always be transient in
nature. The pasts we imagine are part of how we define ourselves.
“It was in the writings but also
in the actions and speeches and sermons of Black United States
citizens that I began to experience the meaning of my whiteness as a
point of location for which I needed to take responsibility." A.
Rich
Adrienne Rich ably demonstrates how
it is through engagement with ‘others’ we are able to consider more
clearly who we are ourselves. Through travel and journeys this
engagement with the ‘foreign’ or ‘other’ whilst helping to locate
and give new insights into the narrative by which we define
ourselves, also transforms and produces new sections of the
narrative. This new chapter in the narrative over which we have only
limited control is compared to a contrived historical zenith in the
story and is found wanting from some localities. These changes and
their diversity are disturbing to us.
“A place on the map is also a
place in history.” A. Rich
The French ‘Histoire’
translates as ‘story’, ‘an account’, which is what history is, it is
the narrative by which we define ourselves. Sections of Western
societies today seem to have located a highpoint in this narrative
as a place on a map, a permanent imperial pinnacle, viewing today’s
changes as an erosion of this ‘greatness’ which they must forever
struggle to maintain.
Travel and
technological advances as well as fuelling the growth in tourist
travel have also brought about an era of rapid and mass migration
whether forced through conflict, or developed through political
change and economic circumstances; our visits to ‘other’
destinations are creating the global village and there are
inevitable consequences and changes. Whilst we are locating
ourselves through visiting the ‘other’ we generate a consequential
series of events, as the other re-defines itself.
Through travel we are the very envoys
bringing the change we resist.
|