I have been thinking about the work of Tacita Dean and how it relates to some of the concerns I am interested to explore in the project Traversal. While researching Dean’s work recently, I came across a number of short texts she has written that are included in the final section of a book published by Phaidon. The text that I found most interesting and perhaps most enlightening about her practice is entitled Tristan da Cunha. In it Dean writes of her fantasy of visiting the most remote island in the world, which is apparently Tristan da Cunha, to be left there for a year without any form of communication with the outside world, apart from the mail boat which appears once a year. She re-tells a dream, where she had the realisation that when the mail boat arrived, it would also be the same boat that would mark the end of her year and facilitate her return home; this thought of leaving panicked her and she felt disappointed at the letters she could not send or receive – of all the news she could not get.
Not only is the journey (so far) an unrealised fantasy, but also a fantasy of a world where you can get lost; as Dean explains, even Tristan da Cunha has a satellite public phone and the governor now has email. So time moves relentlessly on for this remote and distant land too. It is clear to see from the text that Dean hungers for these spaces where one can dream of becoming lost, where linear time has little meaning and the past and the future are all somehow present in the now. In conclusion Dean writes, ‘So I realize, suddenly, what is at the heart of this draw to the Earth’s edges – to the desert and to the sea, or to the ice at the bottom of the world, or the volcano risen out of the ocean. In these places, we are not bound by the rules of human time; we can be free of a history that cannot mark a surface in constant flux like that of the sea or the or the shifting dunes of the desert, or one brutalized by weather or extremity. In these places, we can imagine millennia; we can image prehistory and can see the future.’
Accompanying the text are reproductions of an old postcard and photograph, both images of an unstated location or date, both have German words painted in white across them indicating aspects of what is pictured.
Tacita Dean, Himmel/See, 2005.
Tacita Dean, Luft/Immergrune/Sandboden, 2005.
For me Dean’s fascination with time resonates with Henri Bergson concept of durée (duration): the dynamic movement of passing yet continuing time, in other words time that is not divisible into past and future, but is qualitative rather than quantitative. It is this concept of durée that is in my mind when I consider some of the still images from Traversal.
A small project on Australian cinemas stems from a curiosity and appreciation for 1930's cinema architecture. The era of these buildings has gone, but many of the buildings still remain in Australia's cities and towns - though now disappearing at a fast pace. This project document's a small sample of these buildings that housed the special occasion that going to the picture palace once was. At that time, the event of going to the cinema was not only about the image projected on the screen, but also an engagement with the building in which the film was shown, an engagement that was to transport the patron to another world; separated from the realism and drudgery of daily life they found themselves in a splendid and out-of-the-ordinary environment in which to escape for a few hours. The buildings photographed stand in varying conditions and some no longer operate even as cinemas, however, each façade is embedded with a glamorous memory of the silver-screen.
Move across an area: transitive verb to travel or move across, over, or through an area or a place
To go back and forth across something: transitive and intransitive verb to move backwards and forwards across something
Traverse (noun)
Movement across an area: a movement or journey across, over, or through something
Route taken: a route or way across, over, or through something
Traversal is a new project that I am working on that intends to explore the relationship between the embodied and disembodied travel experience.
The framework for this project is grounded in historical changes that took place in the 19th century with the emergence of the railroad as a dominant form of transportation - taking over from the stage coach and walking, for example. I am particularly interested the effect this development had on perception for those traveling. Wolfgang Schivelbusch1 has suggested that the railway journey made possible a new way of perceiving the landscape that was very different from earlier forms of travel experience. Schivelbusch claims that, for the passenger, rail travel supported a panoramic perception of the terrain; this suggestion is put at odds to a multi-sensual engagement with the environment that was much more the case in pre-industrialized forms of transportation. In panoramic perception, Schivelbusch suggests, the traveler sees objects and landscapes mediated through the apparatus of the train. In this, the space of the traveler and the space of the perceived objects is separated and there is dissolution of the embodied experience. The landscape becomes a moving panorama, passing at speed outside the train window - one could imagine this like a movie projected on the window, where the only sensory experience of the landscape is vision - a vision that is separated from any further bodily experience.
To explore these ideas I undertook to traverse the landmass of Australia by train - from the bottom of the country to the top and back again. A journey of 6786km, comprising three train journeys, totaling 124 hours of train travel made during seven days travel. The journey started in Melbourne, Victoria; traveling to Darwin in the Northern Territory and ended in Adelaide, South Australia. All the railroads taken had played a historical role in the industrialization of Australia's transportation system; the earliest route taken was completed in 1888.
The experience of the journey was translated to visual, sonic and written representation using various apparatus, such as: still photography - digital and celluloid, moving image - video, field recordings and written observations.
My main attention was directed to the grand vista and the subtle detail.
1. Schivelbusch, W., The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, New ed., Leamington Spa, UK: Berg. 1986.
