Veduta (souvenir view) a cartographic impulse.

?It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was a place I had always been looking for?

In an age where geography and history intertwine and satellite, images have charted the last voids on the world map. In an age of unprecedented circulation of goods and services and an ever-increasing professional nomadism, where 175 million people are living in a country they were not born in and rising by ten million more every year, travel as become a medium in itself and the artist a traveller.

From postcards and paintings to photography and film, tourism and visual culture have a long-standing history of mutual entanglement. For centuries, art has inspired many an intrepid traveller. Representations in the form of the photographic souvenir have become fundamental to the very reality of tourism. They are foundational components of the imagery and the mechanism of its discourses.

I am interested in exploring the tenuous borders delineating public and private terrains, and that call attention to the overlooked spaces encountered throughout the city, the ?interstitial? and the so-called ?non-places?. Rather than the camera, I use the pre-photography technology of the ?Grand Tour?, the Camera Obscura, to produce souvenir drawings; mapping the "city" as chronicles of participation - connection and disconnection. This project Offers up a thesis of tourism as a set of performances, which blur with those of the everyday and with what Stephanie Hom-Cary terms ?tourist moments?; brief instances, during which tourists connect to the ?other?; moments of social intimacy during which feelings of difference is flipped into feelings of sameness.

The project aims for an engagement with the visual ?surface? of the city beyond familiar tourist clich