Real People Going to Real Places

For Leila El Alaoui’s graduation project she presents us real people (as real as people can get) going to real places (as real as places can get.) Through researching the paradoxes within tourism, how it plays with our sense of reality and the cultural aftermath and mediatization that develops after a popular place has been duplicated on family post-cards and key chains. The cities her models go to are not actual cities, for the reason that the Parises and New Yorks that float through our collective fictions are also diverging more and more from their physical origins. Even more so the original cities are turning into their mass-media fictional duplications, with tourism having to keep up with the unfeasible and unreal expectations of the myth-believing tourists. The tourists travel to alternative worlds, a hybrid concoction of all the ideas, stories, rumors and pictures that are (re)produced of the destinations of present-day travellers and tourists.The tourists themselves, people like you and me, are just as unreal (or hyperreal) as the cities they go to. Formed after the beauty standards, fashion trends and norms and values of the world they live in, they become duplications of the people we look up to on our big and small screens. They are families, individual travellers, couples, but never having an identity of their own. As true agents of capitalism, these real people are sent to empty their wallets in these even realer cities, taking photographs with every step and thus duplicating the city even more. ------ Leila El Alaoui takes inspiration from the visual culture of hyperreal tourism, and translates them into fashion through decontexualizing their initial meaning within the realm of popular culture. She uses many arbitrary objects to create real 21st century personas that could be even more real than the real people you come across in the train every day. ------- In collaboration with Leila El Aloui. Text, video and visuals by Levi van Gelder.