Page - 147 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Birgit Englert | On the (Im)possibility of Writing a Travelogue 147 film Gondari Voices — Legends from Northern Ethiopia, included in the book via a link.13 In the film, Ramos relies on the same sketches that are featured in the book to give spec- tators an impression of the scenery. These are mobilized in the film as the camera floats over the pages, zooming in and out on various details. By using the camera as a tool to mobilize his sketches, Ramos confirms his mistrust of the camera as a suitable tool for capturing the landscape and scenes of daily life. The — exclusively male — storytellers from different parts of the Gondar region are in fact shown on film as they tell their stories in Amharic,14 each tale separated by a short sequence in which the camera floats over the sketches.15 Sketches and their textual components The style in which the different sketches are drawn differs greatly from case to case. While some are black and white, others are in colour; on some pages, sketches of both types are com- bined. A certain heterogeneity can also be noted with regard to their size. Whereas in some cases one sketch extends over the entire page, other pages feature a collage of several sketches. In some instances, these are placed in neatly demarcated frames; in others, individual images collide with each other. Diversity also comes through in terms of the different drawing styles Ramos employs. Whereas some sketches appear to have been drawn rather quickly, others boast numerous details and have been very carefully developed. While there are many sketches without a textual component, a good number of them are com- posed of both a visual and a textual element. The heterogeneity characteristic of Ramos’s sketches more generally is also displayed in the way textual elements feature within them. On a formal level, capital letters can be noted as a unifying feature of the textual components inserted by Ramos. As briefly mentioned above, in the Portuguese versions of the book the sketches contain much more text than the same sketches in the English version. Just below a sketch in the Portu- guese text, for example, Ramos notes down the words used in greetings in Amharic, an element that is missing in the English version. Ramos explains this as follows: ‘[…] as the digitized diary pages mixed drawing and text in Portuguese, I thought it wouldn’t make sense either to keep them in Portuguese or to translate them into English. So, I simply deleted the text (with a few exceptions)’ (personal communication with Ramos, 20.9.2020). The reduction of written text in the sketches obviously changes their character. Its absence doubtlessly leaves the reader with more questions, not least because the written text also explains some of the images that are more difficult to ‘read’ without it (such as the sugarcane example). The main difference, however, is the effect that the textual elements in the sketches have on the expression of subjectivity. The textual annotations in the sketches serve to fur- ther underscore their subjectivity by explicitly reminding the reader of the author’s presence. 13 The link <http://hdl.handle.net/10071/16501> [accessed on: 21.09.2020] leads to a repository at the University of Lisbon, where a full-size version of the film can be downloaded. It can also be viewed on YouTube, where the film Gondari Voices: Legends from Northern Ethiopia is available on Ramos’s personal account: <https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=OFxegBMXa1Q> uploaded on 20.08.2018 [accessed on: 21.09.2020]. The sixteen-min- ute-long film was produced in 2018, the same year the English version of the book was published. The editing was done by Ramos himself, with credits for additional editing given to Carmen Castello-Branco. 14 English subtitles are provided. 15 Only on one occasion does the camera span the audience, which is gathered next to the storyteller. It is also the only instance in which Ramos himself is visible (cf. 7:07).