Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Middlesex University
Voyage of no Return, Video and Sound Installation
The video and sound installation ‘Voyage of no Return’ was filmed and edited simultaneously as a short narrative film, a spatial five-channel synchronised video installation, and a customised twenty two-channel video, programmed and presented exclusively at the Threshold Arts Space, Perth in 2009. The work explores the constructs of ideas on place, non-place and placelessness, and has its emphasis on unfolding the habitual socio-political and cultural patterns of mobile cultures. The concept is based on the idea of a geographical location, a city which ‘...has a simple secret: it knows only departures, not returns’, as described by Italo Calvino in his book Invisible Cities during a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Another layer of connotations embedded in the concept is the condition of being adrift as depicted by Marcel Broodthaers in his film from 1972 entitled Un Voyage en Mer du Nord. ‘Voyage of no Return’ takes on a number of issues raised in my previous large-scale works and adds a layer of literary references. A father prevaricates - cautioning his son, at first, about the dangers of travelling – but then, encouraging him, as he knows a father should, to set out and explore the world.
The striking landscape around Oban, Scotland and its unfinished McCaig’s Tower, are the setting for this rift between a father and son, which is also a meditation on frontiers: those which separate geographies, cultures, as well as dream from reality. The son envisages the port below as having a simple secret. “It knows only departures, not returns.”
The output is presented via portfolio, which should be viewed in order to gain a proper understanding of the research.
