Lucia Coppola – Open School East

This video installation proposes tourism as a medium for revelations about self and other, and witnesses an interaction beyond the characters immediate senses.

The protagonist, Rosa, is an extra-terrestrial tourist turned tour guide. She leads a small group of visitors around her town, culminating in a final experience at the Druids Social Club. Tourism is a phenomenon that tries to represent culture and place, but instead creates new, peculiar and hyper-real realms. Influenced by the ideas in Azuma’s ‘Philosophy of The Tourist’ which considers the figure of the tourist anew. Roman Road invites the audience to perceive the tourists as willing outsiders.

By examining themes of alienation and ownership, it explores the duality of place—both reliably familiar and entirely strange. What does it mean to own something? The film is also interested in oral histories and urban myths. Places can’t speak for themselves, are descriptions, explanations and learnings of a place an attempt to pocket it for ourselves and those ‘like us’? Similarly, local museums, attractions, and archives prompt us to consider whose stories have been overlooked.

The narrative employs conventions of ‘the reveal’ and ‘point of view’ and uses voices who serve as ‘unreliable narrators’ to explore themes of belonging, arrival, and perspective. Alongside the use of humour, all the devices together are trying to shift the viewer’s position and make it harder to side with a perspective; who is the ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Text written with Beatriz Lobo

Credits

Tour Guide played by Rosa Brentnall; Tourists played by Zelda Solomon, Samuel Esteves Vilanova, Louis Glanfield; Sound Recordist, Laur Rozier

Lucia Coppola – Open School East

This video installation proposes tourism as a medium for revelations about self and other, and witnesses an interaction beyond the characters immediate senses.

The protagonist, Rosa, is an extra-terrestrial tourist turned tour guide. She leads a small group of visitors around her town, culminating in a final experience at the Druids Social Club. Tourism is a phenomenon that tries to represent culture and place, but instead creates new, peculiar and hyper-real realms. Influenced by the ideas in Azuma’s ‘Philosophy of The Tourist’ which considers the figure of the tourist anew. Roman Road invites the audience to perceive the tourists as willing outsiders.

By examining themes of alienation and ownership, it explores the duality of place—both reliably familiar and entirely strange. What does it mean to own something? The film is also interested in oral histories and urban myths. Places can’t speak for themselves, are descriptions, explanations and learnings of a place an attempt to pocket it for ourselves and those ‘like us’? Similarly, local museums, attractions, and archives prompt us to consider whose stories have been overlooked.

The narrative employs conventions of ‘the reveal’ and ‘point of view’ and uses voices who serve as ‘unreliable narrators’ to explore themes of belonging, arrival, and perspective. Alongside the use of humour, all the devices together are trying to shift the viewer’s position and make it harder to side with a perspective; who is the ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Text written with Beatriz Lobo

Credits

Tour Guide played by Rosa Brentnall; Tourists played by Zelda Solomon, Samuel Esteves Vilanova, Louis Glanfield; Sound Recordist, Laur Rozier