Travelling South is a visual essay composed of stills, found and restaged photographs, and footage taken on the English coast, Elafiti (Croatia) and Gotland (Sweden). Exact geographical locations are not revealed, but are alluded to. There is an actor/protagonist in the film (one character, but represented in two ways: a black and white photograph, and footage of an actor), who has no specific role other than that of a conceptual character who wanders through the space of the film, and across times, sometimes acting as the connecting component between shots, as an underlying constant, in sound terms a repetitive baseline or a chorus.
Photo: Tina Gverović, 2012
Although related directly to the locations, the sound is not descriptive of the visual element and it is produced separately from the film. The sound generally creates the sense of an internal space (or weaving between private, interior, cerebral, bodily space and the outside world of things and people, concrete sounds, concrete realities…), relating to daydreaming, but not ‘dreamy’. There are some slightly ‘psychedelic’ elements to film, in which ‘real’ or figurative images turn abstract, and vice versa.
Film/footage deals with themes of belonging and memory, displacement and imagination. It presents the idea of journeying and travelling south, and attempts to present a method of finding out, of investigation and discovery rather than representation.
The key questions are related to the impossibility of establishing identity on ‘solid grounds’, the lack of which encourages us to relate to various communities which can allow us a certain kind of temporary identity; or which on the other hand allows us to wander in standardized spaces produced by contemporary industries of the imaginary. Can we free ourselves from our heritage arriving at the place where we no longer depend on culturally specific categories/groups that we are born in, with a style of life that through our upbringing is moored in us?
Tina Gverović
Zaton, Dubrovnik, July 12, 2012