Tourists came and took portraits of themselves against the view. De Mahieu noticed that, as soon as someone stepped in front of the camera, they would shed their layers in defiance of the cold to convey the image of a blissful summer. In front of the camera: T-shirts, floaty dresses. Behind it: swathes of padded jackets. It was Instagram versus reality.
De Mahieu’s photo series, which she calls Theatre of Authenticity, explores the link between tourism and spectacle, and how we perform when we travel, particularly when we think no one is watching. The photos make up the graduation project for her masters degree in documentary photography, and bring together the three issues that most preoccupy her: tourism, social media and climate change.
Catherine Ryan Howard structures the novel like a Chinese box. Each story opens out to reveal a parallel one inside. Strung through the narratives is a lead character who is a clone of those in the other versions. For all these heroines, for they are all young women, it is definitely time to run.
Time is running out and death is near. It is similar to Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life in which Ursula dies over and over again. Does each death render the reader insensate to the following one? Or is it, like in a horror film, a way of building tension for the next shock? Or maybe like a bad dream in which you are ready to run, but you are, somehow, paralysed. It may, indeed, be Run Time, but how to run and where to?
When your body becomes a cathedral
for holy communion, your tongue will grow
into a souvenir of songs lost in the throat