dine-and-dash
COLLAGE | ILLUSTRATION
A collage combining travel imagery and drawings to
capture the consumption of place and its frictions in
current tourism culture.
Project Context
April 2018
Independent, self-initiated project
College work
Tools Used
Food and travel magazines, postcards and books
Craft tools
Drawing tools
Project Brief
dine-and-dash is a satirical take on current trends and conversations around travel and tourism through the lens of consumption. This project began as an inquiry into the inevitable failure of a tourist to grasp the true ‘local’ experience of a place.
By simply being tourists, we distance ourselves from the ‘authentic’/ ‘local’ experience as we want to nibble at the best a place has to offer, shop for antiquities and souvenirs to take back, have a curated list of offbeat places, have the most unique adventure while being booked in a 5-star hotel chain. We seek a paradox of the exotic and local - a failure that lives like a secret in the open.
Created by juxtaposing drawings and found images (postcards, posters and advertising promoting places in India), this project is an attempt to tease out the almost unreal expectation of the tourist to have a 'local' experience and make visible the many ways in which this failure thrives around us.
'Picture perfect' - one of the initial collage experiments
WORKING WITH FOUND MATERIAL
In the age of social media, where curating one’s daily experiences and consuming others’ lives is a habit, travel and travel imagery has become even more of a consumable commodity.
We learn to expect a clean and aesthetic exotic from these pictures that sell the idea of a place. Locally, however a place is a sum of its parts, even the one’s the postcards leave out. Keeping this in mind, working with the collected material (travel magazines, postcards, posters) was
important as it would ensure the physical presence of this kind of 'exotic' and 'fantastical' gaze.
However, this made composing the collages a challenging puzzle as the images would have to fit conceptually as well as according to the scale and size.
The process of finding the right 'fit'
Some details from the final collage
THE MAP MENU
In order to make the work more accessible, I decided to edit and scale the final artwork down into a map/menu. The form of a map/menu was intentional as it would continue the analogy of consumption of food and place.
