Travels with Isabella. Travel Scrapobooks, 1883-2008, 2008
26’30″, loop
Music: Fa Ventilato
Courtesy the artist and ISGM, Boston
During her residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2007, artist Luisa Rabbia was inspired by photographs Isabella Gardner collected and pasted into elaborate travel scrapbooks while traveling in China in 1883. . . . In Travels with Isabella (2008), Rabbia takes and rearranges these archival photographs to create a video of an imaginary landscape, and a running panoramic view of her own journey through these photographs, and through space and time. The artist animates these archival photographs with her own drawings, along with music and other images inspired by her residency. The result is a fantastical narrative that is both contemporary and historical. (Pieranna Cavalchini)