Unnecessary journeys: Camera-escorted sojourns, pilgrimages and relocations

Abstract

It is a common feature of moving image works that they spotlight journeys voluntarily undertaken by artists seeking to engage with different cultures and landscapes. This article focuses on Measures of Distance (1988) by Mona Hatoum and News from Home (1977) by Chantal Akerman, two itinerant works that explore the relationship between mother and daughter across continental divides. The maternal separation intersects with a feminist imperative to widen the artists’ creative horizons in the 1970s and 1980s. These works are set in a broader canvas of what Jane Mills terms ‘sojourner’ films by artists such as Tacita Dean, Jonas Meka, b.h. Yael and Jini Rawlings, works that encompass transnational odysseys of return and pilgrimages ‘footstepping’ notable earlier travellers. A distinction is drawn between cross-border works that predominantly respond to a sense of adventure or a need to seek out the balm of wild environments and those that set up a dialogue between locations overseas and narratives and sensibilities the filmmaker brings from elsewhere.