–> deutsche Version

–> Television, Remote Control and Foreign Travel (Text)

2001

video_003

The source material is a holiday film, which my grandmother shot in the 1920’s on Bali. Although she was herself Indonesian by birth and had grown up on Java, she filmed life on the neighboring island from a tourist viewpoint. She was evidently fascinated by the ”ethnic” ambience and above all by the nakedness of the Balinese women. In her film the inhabitants of Bali appear to be living a paradisiacal life in a paradisiacal landscape. As the wife of a Dutchman she has accepted colonial rule, although the young couple’s marriage resulted in considerable social sanctions and discrimination. In her film she shows her husband in the pose of the colonial master. As an amateur film-maker she stands between colonial power and colonized people. Because of her personal history she becomes a tourist in her own land. Her holiday documentation blurs the boundaries between tourism and colonialism. This film has been neither shortened nor edited and is as such part of an installation consisting of four projections.

video_006

A video cassette produced on Bali for sale there shows the tourist attractions of the island. The subjects are, in part, the same as the ones my grandmother had already captured on film. Likewise unedited, this commercial video is another element of the installation. The private gaze of the amateur film from the early period of tourism is compared with a contemporary production which aims to stimulate and direct the visitor’s perceptions.

video_005

The third part of this work group is my own video documentation of the route from my hotel to the point of sale of the video described above. The camera is pointed at street scenes at random - first from a taxi, then on foot. Real time and filmed time correspond as in some early works of video art. Here the ideal of the tourist video amateur, who with his camcorder strives for a complete record of his trip, is pushed to an extreme. This contrasts with the selective gaze, directed at the sights and at the exotic, represented in both my grandmother’s amateur film and the commercial video.

video_004

The local color of Bali is staged as cliché on the premises of a hotel. The hotel becomes the theme park of a simulation machine for tourists. The supposedly authentic forms the backdrop of an adventure world, which satisfies all the demands of the spoilt traveler. Every single piece of technological equipment, e.g. air-conditioning, computer and water dispenser, is primly veiled. The traditional exotic clichés suggest something unfathomably alien. The enactment of the exotic in the hotel is the variable interface of Western standards.

Whereas my grandmother in her film let herself be guided by the fascination with exposure, which perhaps corresponded to her own desires for exotic eroticism, my gaze concentrated on the staged concealment of Western culture. The video documents the architectural and sculptural simulation of exoticism. As in Robert Smithson’s ’Hotel Palenque’, what is shown does not match current tourist expectations. While Smithson turns his camera away from the Maya ruins to a hotel, which is in a state of simultaneous construction and decay, my video camera is pointed at the reflection of the local sights as staged in a hotel on Bali. My interest here is in the exotic surfaces, which conceal familiar objects and thus ultimately refer to themselves.

(Theo Ligthart)