Departures
Welkom, Hoşgeldiniz, Bienvenido, أهلا وسهلا, Welcome, 欢迎, Wilkommen, Bienvenue
This exhibition, cast in the form of a travel agency, invites you to explore the position of the tourist. This travel agency does not focus on the destination. While this exhibition places itself within a globalised form of tourism, a specific geographical context emerges, namely the point of departure. This travel agency replaces the travel agency’s model aeroplanes and photo wallpaper with a research station where each work explores its own geography and journey. As a potential tourist in this setting, the visitor is advised to investigate their departure point before the inevitable eruption of post-pandemic travel. Where do you want to go next and how? What will your point of departure be?
The tourism sector offers Western European tourists an endless range of attractions and ready-made experiences purchasable in an instant. The current generation of Western Europeans in their twenties and thirties has had the opportunity to travel to the most distant places as tourists. In today’s experience economy, enriching oneself with life experiences elsewhere is particularly valued. Western European tourists tend to have economic advantages that ensure considerable freedom of movement – a privilege that requires very little responsibility as a tourist and which creates disproportionate relationships. Relationships in which the negative effects are mainly felt by those who do not have this privilege, while the Western European tourist is usually barely aware of the privilege to be allowed and able to move through the world so freely and without borders.
Departures investigates whether it is possible to bid farewell to the current tourism industry and the relationship between tourism and present-day (neo-)colonial power relations. The works in this exhibition have their individual geographies. The artist has already made a journey and takes the visitor with them. Through their approach and creative process, we discover what their respective starting points have been. Some works speak of tourism’s visual culture; others reflect on the tourism industry from a decolonial perspective or offer a ‘tool’ to broaden your view. This travel agency operates along these different departure points. The works activate sensory and contemplative forms of travel that initiate a different experience of place, context and navigation.
Curated by Annosh Urbanke
Graphic design: Studio Janne Beldman
Artists: Alexandra Martens Serrano, De Ansichten Club, Doina Kraal, Irene de Andrés, Marina Planas, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Waèl el Allouche
Open galleryDe Ansichten Club, The Weather Is Disappointing, but the View Is Amazing!, 2021. Photo: Lotte Stekelenburg.
Alexandra Martens Serrano is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher based in Amsterdam. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts from the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague and is currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute. Alexandra’s practice explores the ways in which branches of knowledge production are configured, mediated, and transmitted. In her research, the development of techno-ecologies converges with intersectional ways of reconfiguring, “dubbing”, and entangling the world as it currently is and as it could speculatively be. Using and blending various traditional techniques, diverse materials, and software, she engages the beyond-human identities and assemblages within her practice with larger frameworks of linguistics, biopolitics, science, and histories.
Waèl el Allouche is an artist and designer who graduated from the École nationale des ponts et chaussées (ENPC) in Paris and from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Interested in the way abstractions shape reality and vice versa, he makes different perspectives comprehensible through unorthodox applications of data and combines factual information with poetic and philosophical insights. By digitising phenomena and objects from the world around him, he tries to understand them before returning them to reality as reconstructions.
De Ansichten Club (The Postcard Club) is a collective that researches the postcard and its function, its aesthetic values, its history, and its future. It was founded in 2015 by designer Byrthe Lemmens, image researcher Elki Boerdam, and visual anthropologist Jip van Steenis.
Marina Planas graduated in audiovisual communication from the Universitat Ramon Llull in Barcelona and earned a Master’s Degree in Photography, Video & Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her family produced postcards during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s for the tourism industry, thus generating the iconography and holiday pictures of the Balearic Islands. She currently carries out projects on issues related to the archive’s subject matter and the idea of generating fiction and desire through tourist utopia. One of her current lines of investigation reflects on the exploitation of images.
Irene de Andrés graduated in fine arts from the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, where she also earned a Master’s Degree in Research and Artistic Production. Irene’s work is strongly related to the fact she grew up in one of the most desired tourist destinations by people looking for sun, beaches, and parties. A couple of years ago, she finished a project about five abandoned nightclubs in Ibiza, Donde nada ocurre (Where Nothing Happens), which approaches the outcome of the island’s tourism history from different fields and perspectives. She is now exploring the analogies between tourism and colonization.
Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a visual artist working mainly with video, filmmaking, photography, and text. She completed her BFA in Film & TV Production and Latin American Studies at New York University and has participated in experimental pedagogical platforms led by several artists. Through a variety of approaches to documentation, her work deepens the subjectivity of historical narratives, examining formal and informal archives, popular imaginaries, and visual culture.
Doina Kraal is an Amsterdam-based artist. She studied fine art at Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and did her master’s at Central Saint Martins’ College of Art and Design in London. Through her multimedia installations and performances, she investigates how an intimate, sensory, enchanting encounter can be established between the triangle formed by an observer, a performer, and an artistic object. Her current projects find their origins in the installation In de Rarekiek (2011–2012), a life-size peepshow box conceived as a translation of the macrocosm in the form of a microcosm and inspired by the historical rarekiek or peepshow.
Opening times:
Wednesday & Thursday: 14.00 to 19.00
Friday: 14.00 to 21.00
Saturday & Sunday: 14.00 to 19.00
Keep in mind the current COVID-19 measures during your visit to MAMA: keep social distance, disinfect your hands and stay home if you have any COVID-19 symptoms.
About HOME
HOME is the leitmotiv by which we encourage conversation about conceptions regarding belonging, representation and identification. HOME is a fundament, the place you return to and anchorpoint for the journey onward. HOME (offline as well as online) is the start of feeling connect to others. Under the name HOME we also present exhibitions in the showroom of MAMA. In collaboration with young makers we express interpretations about HOME | IN REAL LIFE | NETWORKS.
