Arles 2025 : Kourtney Roy, The Tourist

The Tourist contains all the Roy trademarks we love and expect: self-portraiture, a cinematic approach, her distinctive color palette, and a tension between witty winks and sinister atmosphere, conventionality and bizarreness, chic and fake. We also discover with pleasure that the lines between reality and fantasy are blurred. But the outstanding quality of The Tourist lies in the meticulous organization of the moment when we leave our extensive world and enter her intensive one. Roy creates a visual metaphor for a world we think we know. Yet, through her clever use of juxtaposition, we realize it is not the world we think it is. Details are intricately interwoven, so that scenes are simultaneously familiar and foreign…