Veduta (souvenir view) a cartographic impulse.

“It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was a place I had always been looking for”

In an age where geography and history intertwine and satellite, images have charted the last voids on the world map. In an age of unprecedented circulation of goods and services and an ever-increasing professional nomadism, where 175 million people are living in a country they were not born in and rising by ten million more every year, travel as become a medium in itself and the artist a traveller.

From postcards and paintings to photography and film, tourism and visual culture have a long-standing history of mutual entanglement. For centuries, art has inspired many an intrepid traveller. Representations in the form of the photographic souvenir have become fundamental to the very reality of tourism. They are foundational components of the imagery and the mechanism of its discourses.

I am interested in exploring the tenuous borders delineating public and private terrains, and that call attention to the overlooked spaces encountered throughout the city, the “interstitial” and the so-called “non-places”. Rather than the camera, I use the pre-photography technology of the ‘Grand Tour’, the Camera Obscura, to produce souvenir drawings; mapping the "city" as chronicles of participation - connection and disconnection. This project Offers up a thesis of tourism as a set of performances, which blur with those of the everyday and with what Stephanie Hom-Cary terms ‘tourist moments’; brief instances, during which tourists connect to the ‘other’; moments of social intimacy during which feelings of difference is flipped into feelings of sameness.

The project aims for an engagement with the visual “surface” of the city beyond familiar tourist clichés. Lived and perceived everyday environments registered through the Camera Obscura; map and organise the discovered elements to explore the presence of imperceptible stories and values to be decoded as traces of a ‘local’ culture. Furthermore, the city as the “place of the foreign and the foreigner” offers perspectives of and on the “foreign” and yet already familiar. This perspective on the visual side of the contemporary city to reflect on the emphasis and impact of today’s new cities has globally produced images.

The Veduta (souvenir view), is explored here as an artistic method that looks to move among the hidden corners of nomadism, and its precarious and temporary mechanisms the places of transit and communication. Veduta becomes a series of dialogues and encounters in order to investigate the complex association between tourism, and visual culture and how tourism and visual culture intersect with one another and in the process become contested ground.