Rei Sato & Jumi Tanabe

The souvenirs you take home from a trip should be something better than just local crafts and sweets. Rei and Jumi’s idea is to allow you to view your journey in front of you as a summary, to make you live a sensory experience of the places you have seen, involving sight, hearing and smell. A trip is made up of different scenarios, sounds, temperatures and so on. The mix of all these senses creates the memory.
Rei and Jumi imagined a mix of memories from different journeys, translated into sounds and compressed into a record. Records produce sounds by carving grooves. Not just the sounds heard while traveling: even memories engraved in our minds are translated into the melodies.
The covers of these records visually stimulate memories associated with travel. They are the media that connect the images with the sounds inside the disc. After all, travel books usually collect memories through texts, images, materials, photographs… Over time travel memories become uncertain, but diaries allow us to travel back into memory and recover those feelings. Some memories inevitably get lost, becoming abstract, and keeping that idea of abstraction Rei and Jumi decided to visually represent it with the aesthetics of marble, using marbled patterns.
When we leave an airport, as soon as we arrive in a new place, often the first thing we focus on without knowing it is the new smells we perceive. A country can sometimes fix itself in our mind through a specific scent. Even smells can therefore be included in travel diaries, a further step that helps us not to forget, keeping the memory alive.
Using hearing, sight and smell, the travel memories through Rei and Jumi’s artwork become more concrete. Packed in a suitcase, they are the best souvenir they could imagine.