TRAVELOGUE 4: COMING FROM THE WRONG SIDE

Although this Travelogue is essentially a touristic program, Stefaan Decostere’s view introduces no peaceful landscape. The area, Banff, is presented as a recycled product of a generic past, where archetypal images are layered to create the illusion of the passage of time. Television tourist vistas are carefully packaged and presented in order to create unfulfilled desire and the future is presented through static interpretations of what has passed. Through television touristic areas are petrified and mediated so that the moment instantly becomes a memory, an image captured as a future that might have been. Playing with the motion of time, Decostere challenges viewers to keep up: if we cannot predict the future, why rely on hopeful expectations of current obsessions?