Boat diaries: THERE IS SURELY SOME SOCIALISM LEFT IN THE DUSTY CORNER…
Boat diaries: “There is surely some socialism left in the dusty corner” is a growing image database made of cyclical photo-narratives of journeys following a sea route from
Each boat journey lasts for two days (Sunday evening to Tuesday morning), or actually two nights on the sea. Each time same routine is performed, as there is no other content on the boat; going to the terrace, then the bar, the restaurant, checking out the cabin, breakfast… Strangely enough, boat cabins seem to be completely different in a random way; some of them have windows, some desks, some even a sofa. It is completely impossible to foresee which one would have a bath curtain, a placemat on the floor in the shower… each cabin blocks some other time and the journey seems to be through the time, not place-wise.
Traveling through four year seasons there is a change of lightening, but as well a difference of boat passengers and their profile. While during the winter time there is hardly a passenger, or those are mostly displaced university professors, truck drivers that cannot go the road way because of the wind, in the early spring there is a “geriatric” tourism and “religious” tourism both of which introduce a sense of dying and superstitions in regard to the sea, but also a certain fear on the breakfast if there is someone who has dived into the nothingness in complete in the boat cabin. With a first warmth there are tourists which do not take boat cabins but sleep on the floor and make a mess, so called “out-of-season” tourists. Strangely enough, the only thing they talk is – how to buy islands and posses parts of a Croatian coast. The summer brings a mass tourism and kills the enjoyment in a noise, mess, dirt, sweat, chaos of questions.
Among all the tourists there are some, as well, that are boat fanatics, they smoke cigars, drink rum and wear navy t-shirts for the occasion… putting all the senses of the boat that change into the stabile one; boat is only a boat, not the vehicle of time, of politics, of a mass tourism...
So while the twelve hour sailing becomes a place of repetitive rituals, which always turn themselves into something else, precisely because of all changes in private and public place of the boat, which depend on the season, the hardware stays the same. Both boats “machines” still carry something of the socialism, not only in the visual sense, but also concerning specific details as the food, furniture, a sense of disconnection, of utopia…
Immediately after sailing out the TV signal is lost and after a while there is a loss of the mobile phone network. Somewhere on the sea only Italian mobile operators can be detected. Twelve hours latter usually the information shock happens; in the coffee shop someone says a terrible thing was reported in the yesterday’s news and the whole "continental" population seem to be fine with it, while boat passengers only need to catch up the time lost on the sea.
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