Traveller s Tales Tim Sharp. 2003

Travellers Tales does not only pursue these movements thematically but demonstrates the transition in the form of complex acts of montage. Travellers Tales weaves a dense discursive net around the connections between images, travel, migration and nomadism starting out from found footage loose ends. The latter consist of a total of one and a half minutes of waste from a Germanlanguage documentary production probably from around the year 1970 with the working title Tuareg. From these outtakes, Sharp has extracted individual motifs, mainly static shots of simple events or poses, looped and rearranged them. Just this extraction and reworking alone makes the constructive character of documentary reality visible for example, when a veiled Tuareg (or the person representing him) repeatedly loads his rifle or when another poses with his weapon endlessly, as if time and the history of moving images had been completely suspended.