365 Places: Souvenirs, Travel and Memory
Day 26: Nostalgia is another country
Today, I had an interesting enquiry via my @bytetime account on Twitter. Someone asked me if they could quote my Masters of Arts (by Research) Thesis – Museum of the Personal: Souvenirs and Nostalgia from 2001. This request was quite a blast from the past, as my dissertation was completed 13 years ago and I had sort of forgotten about this work.
Suddenly I had a realisation – that my love of travel and journeying isn’t a recent phenonomen, it has been part of my identity since I was a small child. One of my earliest memories is of our road trip from Brisbane to Cairns where we saw many beautiful parts of the Great Barrier Reef along the way – I was six years old. I was fortunate in that my parents loved taking us on road trips and camping when we were young, embedding in me a love of travel and of nature.
My Masters thesis was the theoretical side of a project I had worked on through the mid to late 1990s – Big Banana Time Inc. To summarise, BBT Inc, explored tourism and souvenirs in terms of consumption, the creation of personal identity, place and cultural identity. It was a playful project, where I experimented with digital photographic collage to create souvenir objects, video/projections and installation works.
Display from BBT Inc 1997
One of the books I read during this time was titled The Past is a Foreign Country
That must have been gratifying, as well as providing that reminder of how long you have followed these inclinations.
Indeed! It was really nice that someone was still interested in this work. 🙂