The Journey

“We put the world before you by means of the bioscope” The Charles Urban Trading company, 1903 Mira Sanders’ video and accompanying installation takes as its point of departure the history and evolution of tourism, the question of increased mobility and travel that was democratised at the second hald of the twentieth century, and how this history is represented as image. Beginning with an old post card of a landscape observation tower in Heistop-den-berg, Sanders proceeds to examine a whole of host of images of tourist monuments and landmarks, translating them into drawings to examine their meaning as symbols, their construction and function. The project is based on an investigation of the language of tourism and how that has evolved since the explosion of the phenomenon in the last 50 years. Sanders’ work revolves around questions of representation and this particular project is a comparative research into the various genres that constitute the tourist landscape. Apart from monuments, Sanders also explores dioramas, panoramas, and landscapes, with a particular focus on differing perspectives, how these images are framed and which representational tools are used to convey a certain view thus aiming to raise awareness about how these images are constructed. Using archival material, books, paintings and photographs as references Sanders select and transcribes certain images into drawings in order to urge closer contemplation of their structure. The project is ultimately a kind of mapping the history of tourist representation and the ‘architectures of tourism’, while at the same time exploring the role of photography in the genre’s evolution, and of painting before that. How has this kind of representation changed over the years? What kind of differences exist within the genre itself? How does perspective change the view we have an image? What is the difference between the expectation, the representation and the reality of the tourist experience? When does a monument or landscape become worthy of representation? These are some of the questions the project aims to raise. Katerina Gregos, 2009 (Hidden in Remembrance is the the Silent Memory of our Future, catalogue CONTOUR 2009, pp. 148, A-Prior, Mechelen, Belgium)status: publishe