About The Kingdom
The Kingdom consists of photographs or, more properly put, snapshots taken on a four-day family vacation to Walt Disney World in March, 2013, in between more conventionally touristy photos. The images were selected, sequenced, and laid out in book form in November and December of the same year. All but two are exactly as they came from the camera, with no digital manipulation; the remaining two were slightly cropped. The idea for the project arose during the many slow periods that such a vacation involves – waiting in line to buy snacks or soft drinks or for the children to get off a ride – as I grew fascinated with the great variety of textures that the surfaces (walls, pavements, ponds, and so on) of Disney World offered. The original idea was simply to construct an abstract comic out of those textures, but as the project progressed the concreteness of the materials, surfaces, and sites photographed came to the fore, and along with it, ideally, a more complex sensory evocation of the fuller experience of the trip, or perhaps of any such trip. The nights in between the days are marked with photographs of the interior of our hotel room, as well as of the graininess of TV images. As much as possible, I tried to stay faithful to the chronology of the vacation: all images for each day and for each night are grouped together, and their sequence reflects our trajectory, from morning to evening, through the topography of the respective theme park we visited that day.
Also by Andrei Molotiu
13 drawings, from Seedings, issue two
from Gaspard de la Nuit by Aloysius Bertrand (as translator) from Seedings, issue two