Are we nearly there?

33cm x 23cm x 10cm

 

Description

Fabric suitcase, souvenir items: badges, flags, hats

 

Themes, comments & storylines

Travel & souvenirs. The souvenir as Extinguished experience.

 

The journey, the suitcase as metaphor. Research as journey. Where exactly is “there”? Departures & destinations, destinies. Journeys undertaken not by choice, but by necessity. Hardship, migration, flight, uncertainty. Where does the journey end, do we want it to end, where will we end up?

 

“The double function of the souvenir is to authenticate a past or otherwise remote experience and, at the same time, to discredit the present.” (Stewart 1993:139)

 

The tourist can find “the representation of culture in the guidebook and the postcard more significant and more attractive than the true culture, contaminated by history and difference, can ever be.” (Stewart 1993:92)

 

Stewart, Susan (1993), On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Duke University Press, Durham and London

 

 

In journeys and storytelling “it is in the movement from place to place – or from topic to topic – that knowledge is integrated.” (Ingold 2007:91)

 

Ingold, Tim (2007), Lines: A Brief History, Routledge. London and New York

 

 

A different, perhaps less impatient, journey of learning and transformation can be found in the suitcase of the Journeyman, a particular life story in Father in a Suitcase, and a research project in  a suitcase as a PhD.