“To Travel is to Possess the World”

American Anthropologist, 2010

Visual Anthropology, 2002

2020

The critical horizon of the paper is that which considers the 'imaginary question' as an essential premise for any reasoning on the culture of representation as it is declined in the cultural production of contemporaneity. In this context of reflection, the 'question of images' requires particular attention about the role of the viewer and the practices of fruition and consumption of visual texts; processes that include questions relating to the mechanisms of the gaze, to the different forms of visual effectiveness of a text, to the 'performative' value of images and that is, to the ability they have to induce us to do things, to suffer from them, to modify cognitive and tactical itineraries of behaviour. In the final analysis, the contribution intends first of all to ask questions about the meaning that today the delicate process that governs the transition from vision to representation and from this to the 'attribution of meaning' has, placing once ...

Travel and Representation, 2017

2019

The growing success of TV travel documentaries lies in this unusual way of travelling and in the fully engaging experience that its multimodal dimension offers. Travel documentaries have the power of nullifying time and space, making Star Trekian fictional teleportation possible; they are a powerful way of closing the gap between the viewing audience and distant tourist destinations. Thanks to the wide diffusion of technology and social networks these types of documentaries are more accessible by everyone everywhere. Derived from documentary films, travel documentaries have developed their own genre with specific features and organisation: a genre used by the tourist industry to persuade the target audience or by TV channels to sell tourist products ranging from videos to travel tours. Documentaries offer both the logic of immediacy and that of hypermediacy typical of remediation since they heighten the viewer's experience of the event as authentic. This contribution illustrates...

Studies in Travel Writing, 2018

Special Issue on Travel Writing and the Visual

Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 2015

2022

2013

This practice-based research presents an analysis of the representation of embodied experience in the travelogue film genre. It reflects upon the embodied and synaesthesic nature of the cinematic experience by tracing a shift in travelogue filmmaking from the ocular realism characteristic of early travelogue films to the emergence and proliferation of subjective approaches. Moreover, it analyses experimental travelogue films and the capacity of non-linear and non-narrative structures to express sensuous, embodied perception. 9 Meditations is the practice component of this thesis. It is an experimental travelogue film. Through its production this research explores the translation of embodied experience as a multi-sensory process into filmmaking practice. In the field of film studies, the travelogue has not been widely discussed outside historical approaches, and it has certainly never been discussed in relation to phenomenology and embodied sensation. This research articulates a new ...