They remain strong symbols for dreams and desire. Our homes, and fruit from far away countries are sold around the corner.īut even though the reality of the concept exotic is changing, certain images and objects (as the ones mentioned above) remain exemplary for the exotic and otherness – and they might have more to do with an internal longing for all things different, for the ‘other’, than for the actual exotic places. Ronment, we have made it increasingly our own. Furthermore, by incorporating the ‘exotic’ into our daily envi. Today, former exotic arenas might even be changing into ultra-modern technological societies. We are more familiar with these once mysterious destinations, since we ‘experience’ them through television and Internet or may have visited them personally. For-eign places, previously unknown, are now closer than ever. For even as you reside in the ‘exotic’, the desire is still present.Ī C H A N G I N G C O N C E P T O F T H E E X O T I Cĭue to globalisation’s acceleration, the experience of the faraway is changing. This might illustrate that the exotic is no more than a concept – its roots not tied to any actual geographical location – but that the desire of it constitutes a psychological longing for the ‘other’.
Gauguin did not paint Tahiti, but his Tahitian dream. Tahitian writer Chantal Spitz claims that Tahitians do not identify themselves with the way in which Gauguin represented them and their country, but that the painter drew an image of the ‘exotic’ Tahiti as he desired it to be. When Paul Gauguin, one of the painters who introduced primitivism into art, painted Tahiti, he did not report on Tahiti as it actually was, but as he saw it. The desire that results (or lies at the heart of its creation) is based on what we expect the exotic to be, feel, or look like, and not on what it actually constitutes. Our mind seems to create an idea of the exotic, and images guide us in shaping and forming these ideals. Whether our fantasies about the foreign are closely connected to reality is debatable. These images and objects are archetypes of otherness all charged with a symbolism that makes us dream of and long for the exotic or the other. Think of paintings of wild waterfalls, the yellow coloured carpet at your local travel agency or a map of the unknown. A banana box being a stereotypical example, objects and images tend to trigger a desire to be elsewhere. Bear and Tiger’s idea of Panama was not based on facts, but the banana box stimulated a desire which resulted in a fantasy about this place. But the story also seems to be about the way in which we imagine far places and create fantasies about exotic destinations. Simply put, the moral of this story comes down to the concept that the grass is not always greener on the other side: Bear and Tiger already had everything they could have wished for. T H E I M A G I N A T I O N O F T H E ‘ O T H E R ’ Not realising they’ve ended up where they started, Bear and Tiger happily nest in their ‘Panama’, their ‘new’ home.
They pack their bags and embark on a journey that will eventually lead them back to their own home, unrecognizably overrun by plants and trees. The children’s book In Search of Panama by Janosch tells the story of Little Bear and Little Tiger, two friends on a quest to discover Panama after finding a banana box in a river that triggers a longing for this land of their dreams (“where it smells like bananas from top to bottom”). Where the sun always shines and bananas are free! “What a wonderful place this Panama must be, Inside it was fruit, both yellow and ripe: On the box was a stamp that did proudly declare: Little Bear then knew they’d be friends forever. Little Tiger helped they caught it together. Little Tiger looked up then spoke no moreįor there was a box and it floated on by.įish it out of the stream Little Bear did try. One morning as they sat and spoke by the shore Both having ‘the exotic’ as their starting point they came to diverse ways of presentation which, as we will find out in the text of Siemerink, at the bottom share the same in-depth emotion.)
(This text written by Else Siemerink came about alongside the working period of Michiel Hilbrink for WE TELL STORIES. That perhaps the journey is more fascinating The exotic, for the ‘other.’ Hilbrink shows How do theseĭesires, our personal and universal longing Wild waterfall or a banana box – can sparkĪ curiosity for the ‘other’. Images: images of the familiar, the familiarizedįorm a substantial part of our imagination