Overview

Shot at the World's Largest Truckstop in Walcott, Iowa, the film contemplates the interiors of a Midwestern highway rest stop, creating an essayistic portrait of a familiar site of travel and transience. With attention fixed on the ideological overtones pressed to the surface in the objects for sale, Travel Stop examines how identity is called upon, regressed, emptied, overburdened, or parceled when traversing the non-places along the US interstate. "That the world of things can open itself to reveal a secret life-indeed to reveal a set of actions and hence a narrativity and history outside the given field of perception-is a constant daydream that the miniature presents. This is the daydream of the microscope: the daydream of life inside life, of significance multiplied infinitely within significance." - Susan Stewart, On Longing