Unseen is a research project about finding ways to work with archive material in order to revisit the past and render visible aspects that otherwise would remain unnoticed. Looking at the past to understand and re-evaluate the present and imagine a possible future. Working with archival material is an exercise of keeping historical memory alive and relevant.

I am working in various directions or chapters. One chapter —UNSEEN— by remaking one specific travelogue 'Abyssinian Expedition', made in Ethiopia, in 1926, which I haven’t seen.

Another chapter —'Every story is a travel story'— focuses on revisiting the contexts where travelogue motion pictures were produced historically in and for the western perspective. I will be looking at different methodologies of travelogue film making: from ethnographic motion pictures, commissioned by western national history museums during the 20’s, to independent/experimental travelogues films of the 50’s, where the investigations around notions of fiction and documentary where taking place. How these various modes of film-making relate to the notion of the Other? 'Every story is a travel story' aims to focus on the position of the filmmaker, the observer, the figure of the traveler, in conceiving and producing those films.

Whereas in the western travelogues of the 20's the figure of the traveler is that of a ‘civilized white man’ looking at the Other establishing the paradigm of division in between the 'civilized' and the 'savage', the imperialist binary world order paradigm. This traveler constructs/perpetuates the colonial.

By contrast, the figure of the traveler in independent/experimental films is that of a subject that seeks for the deconstruction of the above mention power structures, that seeks new paradigms by acknowledging the heterogeneity and multiplicity of human existence, which can only be accomplished by traveling. The person of the traveler that experiences in his own body the richness, complexity and multiplicity of the world. The notion of travel in this respect is that of curiosity. As a result the traveler deconstructs his colonial position by its own deconstruction.

Map of Ethiopia, Image from the book 'The fire ox and other years' by Charles Suydam Cutting
(Filmmaker of 'Abyssinian Expedition')
(London: Collins, 1947)

The Netherlands/ Ethiopia/ Chicago
2017

EVERY STORY IS A TRAVEL STORY

Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
by Abraham Ortelius
Antwerp, 1570