Claudia Walton

Set out from the point of view of a passenger travelling from Beijing to Tibet by rail, Cautionary Colours examines the exploitation and appropriation of the Tibetan landscape through narratives of colour, purity and smoothness. It views the train journey itself as a propaganda machine, promoting the engineering masterplan which has allowed industry and tourism to explode in the region. Potential passengers are marketed the journey from China into Tibet as a seamless transition from the greys and browns of polluted Chinese cities to the pure blue skies of the plateau. But the colours of a landscape are fragile and finite resources and extracting them as marketing tools to promote an increase in the industry, in fact, accelerates their degradation. Deconstructing and repositioning the train journey as a series of stage sets in order to expose the exploitation of the landscape has a specific purpose, proposing and constructing something that can truly be experienced. A narrative structure is designed in order to facilitate a distinctly different spatial experience for passengers taking the journey. The target audience is the traveller on the train, and the goal is to develop a new typology of experiencing the landscape by making the views fail.