We are all tourists. If not travelling places, we constantly visit moments in time. We turn ourselves into “souvenir format” when taking photos. Making a place ours by inserting our images onto it. It is not unusual that when we travel to a new place, find a monument, pose for the camera and take a picture. Tourists seem to find themselves in the same spaces, and not by chance. A lot of a country is fragmented and safe kept in families' photo albums.
Temporal Tourism looks through these photos and recreates these moments, overlapping past and present into an interactive double-projection. Through this, it is possible to observe that a lot more was recorded in the attempt to capture a moment in time; in the background some more expendable things, changes of buildings and seasons, but not the monuments. They remained perfectly still, yet not completely unchanged. Expressions of time revealed themselves in the colouring of marble and cracks in the stones. The reenacted photo was not only recreating the moment, but also giving it a surrounding context, exposing what lies beyond the edges of the frame and what has changed since; presences and absences work simultaneously in the image.
On a personal scale Temporal Tourism allows a space and a time for parents and kids, now adults, to look back at their shared memories. On a bigger scale, as people look through changes in London, they also began questioning and sharing their experiences with the metamorphosis of their own cities through time. Bright coloured vests, scaffoldings, temporary fences, and police cars make up the landscape of London, perhaps informing us on a historical concern for safety and practices of preserving traditions. The project uses photographs as testimonies which communicate London's past to us, recognising and commemorating these unconventional ways of recording change in the urban environment.
