Veduta Romantica
mac, Birmingham, UK
22 Nov 2007 - 6 Jan 2008
Gayle Chong Kwan, Veduta Romantica, 2008
Veduta Romantica features a dark, fantastical and foreboding panoramic landscape through a dramatic series of interchangeable photographic images. These connect up to reveal a large tourist development constructed from chocolate, confectionary and packaging based on idealised towns, utopian European settlements, tourism and social master planning with reference to local research about Bourneville Village and Cadbury World.
The work also refers to myths and accounts of colonial encounters in the ‘new world’ and resembles the terrain of the places where the cocoa bean was found and from which it is now exported. Veduta is Italian for ‘view’ and references highly detailed large-scale paintings of early landscapes, cityscapes or vistas, initially developed in Flanders. The title of the work also relates to darker types of social planning; the case of Hitler’s ‘Grand Tour’ of Rome in the 1930s and Mussolini’s seduction of German fascists by excavating and re-configuring the landscape for Hitler’s entry to Rome to more closely resemble the Classical ideal of the Roman Empire, re-termed ‘Romantica’ for the visit.
View images of the exhibition »
