FERNE LÄNDER, FERNE ZEITEN

In the organizer's words:

Area of longing poster
With stories by Felicitas Hoppe

Wanderlust, a longing for adventure and the desire to escape from everyday life: until well into the 20th century, many people were denied the opportunity to travel, it was considered an elitist pleasure. At that time, wanderlust was quenched with the help of pictures and travelogues. Travel posters, which advertised the fantastic and far-flung destinations in large format and color, became a place of longing for most people - "journeys in the mind".

The exhibition brings together around 300 historical and contemporary travel posters, supplemented by numerous photochromes, postcards and a replica of an imperial panorama. The history of travel posters dates back to the century before last: As early as the end of the 19th century, posters advertised luxurious travel destinations, mainly in Europe and North Africa. Their appearance changed considerably in the 1920s and 1930s, with technology and the speed of the trains becoming more and more of an attraction and the subject of advertising. In the 1950s, some airlines commissioned renowned artists to design motifs for entire poster series, and when NASA launched a poster series for fictitious journeys to distant planets in 2019, these designs also became projection screens for the unimaginable.

For the exhibition, Museum Folkwang has enlisted the renowned writer Felicitas Hoppe as a literary companion. Hoppe is a specialist in her field on the subject of "travel in the mind": in her texts, she sheds a completely new light on the areas of longing of travelers and those who have stayed at home. The writer has written exclusive "literary head trips" for nine chapters of the exhibition, which she herself recorded for the Museum Folkwang app and which can be read in the catalog and in a small accompanying book.

To the LITERARY HEAD TRAVELS by Felicitas Hoppe

One part of the exhibition is open to the current situation: students of the Akademie Mode & Design (AMD) in Düsseldorf visualize their ideas of travel in times of climate change and sustainability efforts. Can the dilemma of travel between achievement and responsibility be solved?