In spring 2021, during the last weeks of the second Covid lockdown, I recorded idle cruise ships on 16mm colour film at the Sicilian port of Augusta, near Catania, an operational base for Frontex. I first explored cruise ships during a 2019-2020 trip to Mexico, after I had been alarmed to find how a fishing town had been transformed into a cruise port, and by my own reaction to the results. Highlighting the performative aspect of Western middle-class taste, ONE WHITE WHALE, a project in several parts and still in progress, examines the contradictory allure and rejection of cruise ship tourism, reflecting on nostalgia for a bygone hospitality era.
The title, borrowed from Laurie Anderson, alludes to slaves mistaking a whale skeleton for a fallen angel. Moby Dick‘s stand-in for destructive capitalism connects to cruise ships as eerie, in-between entities floating in a paused world, tied to historical colonizations and modern issues of pollution and polarization.
The multi channel and multi media room installation was centred around 16mm colour analogue footage but included digital juxtapositions as well as objects, notably repurposed and modified Scene-O-Rama, UV print on glass of the analaogue 16mm film as well as gasoline in Martini glasses and Gucci perfumed fresh white towels.