Fall 2024 Students' Art Show: Travel Posters & Soundscapes

The Travel Posters & Soundscapes exhibit presents a collection of soundscapes and posters produced by students in COCO 26: What's in Your Toolbox? The Politics of Travel in the Context of Globalization taught by Francine A'ness and Mokhtar Bouba, Fall 2024.

The Toolbox provides students an opportunity to reflect on why and how we travel. Experiential in design, many class sessions involved practicing the art of mindful, ethical travel and critical reflection-slowing down, listening, wandering, and wondering. We turned Dartmouth and the Upper Valley into our "travel destination," and practiced using all our senses and a mindset of curiosity to think about what we must do to gain a deep sense of place for the places we visit. Entering new spaces and engaging in new experiences, we intentionally went out of our comfort zones to reflect on what is strange and what is familiar. We also made the most of our diverse learning community for story-sharing and dialogue. Collectively, we come from eleven different countries. We are short-term exchange students, degree-seeking international students, immigrants, study-abroad participants, and soon-to-be adventurers.

Tourism prioritizes sightseeing, and our smartphones often contain hundreds of snapshots. To begin to hone the other senses, this year in The Toolbox, we prioritized sound. Students, with support from staff at the Jones Media Center, made four audio projects: two soundscapes, one of "Dartmouth" and the other of "Home," an unscripted dialogue about travel and migration, and an audio postcard.

Travel has long been a symbol of status, an opportunity for adventure, leisure, self-discovery, and learning, but how often do we consider how we show up in communities and the impact of our presence? How often do we stop and wonder who else might be on the move and why? What is the role of globalization in global mobility? Do we ever think about the ways that tourism, a multi-billion-dollar industry, shapes our perceptions of people and places, manufactures our desires, and charms us into ready-made itineraries? To what extent do we know the layered and competing histories —the colonial legacies- of the places we visit and live?

What does it mean to gain a "sense of place?" How does travel change our perception and understanding of ourselves and our homes? How do we welcome others into our homes? How do we treat other people's homes? Our activist posters are designed to raise awareness of some of these questions.