On Back Home

Project work by Rita Begum, Third Year student.


"On Back Home" is a video installation piece about the narratives of personal experiences from a 5 week holiday in Bangladesh in summer 2006.

Contrasting narratives in this short film are portrayed through two important souvenirs: digital video and diary records. The aim of the work is to show layers of meaning from the superficial to the deeper reality. The visual film narrative captures the beauty and fascination of the journey in a home movie style. The literal typewriter narrative
emphasizes boredom and disappointment through honest and embarrassing diary accounts. Just like a souvenir each one carries its own narrative relating to its
origin and can take over the actual memory of the events. In other words the aesthetics would concoct a romantic reverie but the diary would tell of the
regular events. Nonetheless there is a real spatial and temporal element in the video as everything was unpremeditated and recorded as it occurred. However the effects of the holiday were explored afterwards throughout the Autumn 2006.

Relating to Susan Sontag's On Photography (Penguin 1978) for my digital photography and video aesthetics;

'to take a photograph is to relate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability'
'[photographs] are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality'
'photography makes us fell the world is more available than it really is'
'the aim of amateur photographers, for whom a beautiful photograph is a photograph of something beautiful'
'to fight against boredom... you pass through boredom into fascination'
'an invitation to sentimentality'
'the beauties of the everyday'
'each photograph is only a fragment'
'"like any photograph is physically mute. It talks through the mouth of the
text written beneath it" in fact words do speak louder than pictures'
'photographs depict realities that already exist'

Also relating to Susan Stewart's On Longing... (Duke University
Press 2003) for information on souvenirs as objects of meaning:
'we need and desire souvenirs of events that are reportable [whose] materiality has escaped us [thereby] exist only through the invention of narrative [narrative provides] context of perpetual consumption for its context of origin [represents] secondhand experiences of possessor/owner [its] scandal is its removed from its "natural" location. Yet it is only by means of its material relation to that location that it acquires its value.'



More info:
http://rosebud.luton.ac.uk/madwiki/index.php/BA%28Hons%29_Digital_Photography...

http://rosebud.luton.ac.uk/madwiki/index.php/BA%28Hons%29_Fine_Art_/_Art_%26_...

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• University
• Bedfordshire
• Art
• Design
• Photography
• Video
• Luton
• undergraduate
• student