14/02/08 16:13
Dream
We're off to portray Americans. Not the American people, but the American individuals. We seek a multitude of persons and places, of dreams and realities. We want to get behind the scenes, and discover for ourselves what everyday life in the US is like. What happens when the cameras stop rolling? When the lights go out, and the studio gets empty? Does the myth of America rise and fall with the curtain?
We base our travels on the constitutional idea of the American dream. A dream of equal rights and equal possibilites to pursue your own goals in life. A dream that unites as an abstract, but divides as people set sails for different utopian shores. What does the college kid in Massachusetts have in common with the cotton farmer in Texas? Where does the surfer dude in California differ from the shop owner in Wisconsin? How do they envision the future of their lives and their country, and how do they go about making their visions come true?
We open our minds and hearts to those who cross our path, and we tell their stories without prejudice or self-interest. Our intent is to create a compelling series of real-life portraits from the land of dreams. An illustrated guide to American diversity based on interviews, dialogues, and stray thoughts. A contemporary account from the immediate and passionate perspective of the outsider.
Reality
We travel by car from east to west and south to north. We cross state boundaries and doorsteps alike whereever we go. We strike up conversations with the man in the street, and visit people whether at home or at work. No itinerary is planned in advance, no meetings or interviews set up beforehand. We rely on intuition and free association alone. Such are the rules of dreaming. And only by dreaming can we hope to catch reality unawares. Plotting a course would be forming an early opinion.
Perhaps all that can be predicted about our travels is that we will arrive as strangers in a strange land. And having to rely on the kindness of strangers, we want all strangers to know that they can rely on us too. We take our roles as guests seriously, and conform to the routines of our hosts. We join in everyday chores, and help out as much as we can. That's the kind of insight and experience we're after.
We write about people as and when we meet them. The circumstances of the encounters are all we've got to go on. We don't pretend to know more than we do, and we don't mean for anyone to be representative of anything but him or her self. We aren't informed by journalism, biography, or sociology. If anything, we're informed by our desire to paint literary portraits of our encounters with American reality. Set into the narrative frame of our own growing awareness of the country we're traveling, we believe that the portraits can help us form a fuller picture of individual life-worlds in progress.
Every week we do a feature article about one or more of the people who invite us in. We portray them on the backdrop of their physical, temporal, and emotional surroundings, and leave their stories open to multiple interpretations. We want the readers to join in on our observations and conversations, but still to form their own ideas and opinions. The diversity of our portraits is a diversity of choice, and we want the readers in on that choice too.
We aim to publish the articles on our website, and distribute them to papers and magazines as we go along. When we return back home, the portraits will be presented in a book together with pictures, entries, and other goodies from our roadside diaries. To round things off and come full circle, a local Danish artist will supply actual paintings of each and every individual we portray. The grand finale will be an exhibition on Danish grounds of our journey to a country we thought we knew.
Why the US?
Diversity can't be patented, and neither can dreams, prejudices, or the media's constant distortion of reality. It's not just an American thing. Throughout the world, countries are in need of a broader representation of their own inherent realities. So why focus in on the US?
The question begs many answers, and we can't cover them all here. However, two of them have attracted our particular attention. First of all, the US is still the world's leading superpower and trendsetter. No matter where you've decided to set up shop on this planet, you just can't ignore the US - and you shouldn't either. You may praise it to high heaven, or condemn it all the way to hell and back, but it won't change the fact that the US is a global point of as yet unrivaled significance. And whether you like it or not, it is still the main shareholder of our common future. Turning a deaf ear to the US would be turning a deaf ear to the world. Only by listening in can we learn to understand and talk back.
The second reason for choosing the US as our focus is that, paradoxically, it might be the country that we're least likely truly to put our focus on. Perhaps because we're so sure of what we might see that we don't care to take a second look. America has always been America, and America will always be America. At least, that's what we seem to think. We might have a budding sense of the distorted views presented by the media, but we seldom care to investigate our suspicions any further. America itself is turning into a media concept unformulated by its viewers.
Behind the American dream lies the American reality, waiting to be discovered and rediscovered. The journey to the New World must be undertaken time and again. And this time we aren't looking to discover a certain social layer like our famous Danish predecessors Jacob A. Riis ("How the Other Half Lives") and Jacob Holdt ("American Pictures"). We're looking to discover the American individual, and faithfully portray his or her life and dreams.
That's why.
We're off to portray Americans. Not the American people, but the American individuals. We seek a multitude of persons and places, of dreams and realities. We want to get behind the scenes, and discover for ourselves what everyday life in the US is like. What happens when the cameras stop rolling? When the lights go out, and the studio gets empty? Does the myth of America rise and fall with the curtain?
We base our travels on the constitutional idea of the American dream. A dream of equal rights and equal possibilites to pursue your own goals in life. A dream that unites as an abstract, but divides as people set sails for different utopian shores. What does the college kid in Massachusetts have in common with the cotton farmer in Texas? Where does the surfer dude in California differ from the shop owner in Wisconsin? How do they envision the future of their lives and their country, and how do they go about making their visions come true?
We open our minds and hearts to those who cross our path, and we tell their stories without prejudice or self-interest. Our intent is to create a compelling series of real-life portraits from the land of dreams. An illustrated guide to American diversity based on interviews, dialogues, and stray thoughts. A contemporary account from the immediate and passionate perspective of the outsider.
Reality
We travel by car from east to west and south to north. We cross state boundaries and doorsteps alike whereever we go. We strike up conversations with the man in the street, and visit people whether at home or at work. No itinerary is planned in advance, no meetings or interviews set up beforehand. We rely on intuition and free association alone. Such are the rules of dreaming. And only by dreaming can we hope to catch reality unawares. Plotting a course would be forming an early opinion.
Perhaps all that can be predicted about our travels is that we will arrive as strangers in a strange land. And having to rely on the kindness of strangers, we want all strangers to know that they can rely on us too. We take our roles as guests seriously, and conform to the routines of our hosts. We join in everyday chores, and help out as much as we can. That's the kind of insight and experience we're after.
We write about people as and when we meet them. The circumstances of the encounters are all we've got to go on. We don't pretend to know more than we do, and we don't mean for anyone to be representative of anything but him or her self. We aren't informed by journalism, biography, or sociology. If anything, we're informed by our desire to paint literary portraits of our encounters with American reality. Set into the narrative frame of our own growing awareness of the country we're traveling, we believe that the portraits can help us form a fuller picture of individual life-worlds in progress.
Every week we do a feature article about one or more of the people who invite us in. We portray them on the backdrop of their physical, temporal, and emotional surroundings, and leave their stories open to multiple interpretations. We want the readers to join in on our observations and conversations, but still to form their own ideas and opinions. The diversity of our portraits is a diversity of choice, and we want the readers in on that choice too.
We aim to publish the articles on our website, and distribute them to papers and magazines as we go along. When we return back home, the portraits will be presented in a book together with pictures, entries, and other goodies from our roadside diaries. To round things off and come full circle, a local Danish artist will supply actual paintings of each and every individual we portray. The grand finale will be an exhibition on Danish grounds of our journey to a country we thought we knew.
Why the US?
Diversity can't be patented, and neither can dreams, prejudices, or the media's constant distortion of reality. It's not just an American thing. Throughout the world, countries are in need of a broader representation of their own inherent realities. So why focus in on the US?
The question begs many answers, and we can't cover them all here. However, two of them have attracted our particular attention. First of all, the US is still the world's leading superpower and trendsetter. No matter where you've decided to set up shop on this planet, you just can't ignore the US - and you shouldn't either. You may praise it to high heaven, or condemn it all the way to hell and back, but it won't change the fact that the US is a global point of as yet unrivaled significance. And whether you like it or not, it is still the main shareholder of our common future. Turning a deaf ear to the US would be turning a deaf ear to the world. Only by listening in can we learn to understand and talk back.
The second reason for choosing the US as our focus is that, paradoxically, it might be the country that we're least likely truly to put our focus on. Perhaps because we're so sure of what we might see that we don't care to take a second look. America has always been America, and America will always be America. At least, that's what we seem to think. We might have a budding sense of the distorted views presented by the media, but we seldom care to investigate our suspicions any further. America itself is turning into a media concept unformulated by its viewers.
Behind the American dream lies the American reality, waiting to be discovered and rediscovered. The journey to the New World must be undertaken time and again. And this time we aren't looking to discover a certain social layer like our famous Danish predecessors Jacob A. Riis ("How the Other Half Lives") and Jacob Holdt ("American Pictures"). We're looking to discover the American individual, and faithfully portray his or her life and dreams.
That's why.