Title: Never – Never Land
Artist: Rebecca Rütten
Additional contributor: Stella Richter
Designer: Rebecca Rütten
Editor: Rebecca Rütten
Printer: Druckerei Kettler, Bönen, Germany
Publication date and place: 20.01.16 / Hamburg Germany
Edition: 50
Format, binding: Hardcover / Perfect binding
Size: 19,5 x 25,5 cm
Number of pages and images: 36 pages / 23 images
Type of printing and paper: Digital / Gardapat Kira 150g
Retail price: 75 Euro
Book Description: In January 2014 I traveled to Central America for the first time and met an interesting group of long term travelers who settled in a Hostel. Fascinated by this place and it’s people, who seemed so incredibly free, I decided to return in December 2014 with my camera on a self-experiment. In the first month I was positive and motivated. We drifted, wandered aimlessly, letting adventure find us. Everywhere we went we played our own music and rode on the roofs of taxis around the island. We dressed up, drank and danced through the night until the sun would rise. Our community became our new family. Back home nothing waited for us. We had left society behind when we departed our homes. We had entered a different world. After a few weeks of successful integration and initial enthusiasm this travel-utopia transformed more and more into some kind of a dystopia. The people who lived in this hostel understood their freedom in hedonism. The excess bound them and gave them identity. What started as a free thinking project turned in the long run into an allegory for the primitivity of humanity when left to their own devices. My life on in this place was marked with repeating excesses, emotional and physical crashes, superficial conversations with daily changing guests and the feeling of a permanent Deja-vu. My work is a portrait of today’s society and questions the romantic idealized idea of long term backpacking in developing countries. The book of my series “Never – Never Land“ was released in a edition of 50 copies and exhibited in January 2016 at the Gängeviertel Hamburg. Additional to the book I created a small 14.8 x 21 cm booklet with hand written interviews. I decided to just show the answers and hide the questions to give the viewer more freedom to explore the visual medium. Book and Booklet are bonded with a green rubber band and protected in in a plastic zip lock bag like what travelers use. Each cover of the 50 books is decorated with one of 27 different prints.
Book Soundtrack:
- Title: Never - Never Land