Home Away (2004/05)

Looking back on a yearlong trip around the globe, you wonder what shaped this experience the most. First you might think of breathtaking landscapes and unfamiliar cultures, but give it more time and you realise most of your time was consumed by organising trivial necessities. The most trivial and essential of which is: where will I eat and sleep tonight?

Not long into the trip I began documenting the places where I spent my nights. A strict ritual developed: every morning before I left the room, I would take photographs and then make notes of the name of the place and the date. Just like we follow rituals in everyday life back home, we have a tendency to develop them as well during a long trip; probably to introduce instinctively some regularity into the whole inconsistency. This project was one of my daily rituals.

After months of continuous traveling you grow tired of the restlessness and long for a place where you can stay for longer than just a few days. I longed for stability, habit and familiarity, feelings, which in a strange way had nothing to do with being homesick. It is exciting to experience new cultures, but when you do it for a long time without interruption it is also exhausting. Being overwhelmed by all the exotic impressions outside in the real world, hotel rooms often functioned as refuges for my partner and I. In some way the places where we slept were “home” and the photographs of the individual rooms are fragments, which compose my home for the duration of the journey. However this causes a contradiction, as those places were not home, but strange and elusive, which should be symbolised by the objective and detached visual representation.

On a different level the photographs caused an effect, which I didn’t anticipate. Images of landscapes and cultural places often depict a distanced and disconnected representation of the experienced reality and fail to capture the essence of a journey. The pictures of the rooms vividly evoke emotions and memories with me and make the authentic experience of this trip tangible: an argument with my partner, a sleepless night over stolen money in Santiago, a Thai melody coming in the window in Bangkok, patter of monsoon rain in Polynesia.