Online premiere of Travelogue by Jani Ruscica

Animate Projects is proud to announce the online premiere of Travelogue, a beautiful and haunting new film by Finnish artist Jani Ruscica.

Shot on 16mm, the eight-minute film was shot on location at Camden Arts Centre. A moving panorama unravels, but its blank white screen reveals nothing, and subtitled texts from a variety of historical and contemporary sources allude to London - a city only glimpsed from the window as the camera pans the rows of empty seats, for an audience that has not arrived.

In as essay commissioned to accompany the presentation of the film at CAC, Malin Ståhl wrote how Ruscica’s approach is like that of “an anthropologist or sociologist, posing questions about our very being in the world… places, culture identities, and how we define and communicate personal belonging.”

Ruscica deconstructs the idea of the travelogue itself as romanticised history, factual document and idealised experience. Travelogue reflects on the nature of displacement and cultural difference, and in asking how much we can ever know of an ‘other’ place, implicates the idea of ‘artist’s residency’ and the sometimes tension between the need for space, time and isolation to create work, and the desire to engage and connect.

Travelogue is co-commissioned by Animate Projects and Camden Arts Centre, with support from Arts Council England, the Finnish Institute in London and FRAME. The film was presented at Camden Arts Centre from 31 March-4 April 2010.