Grand Tour centres on two film works: the short film Vom Nil shot on mobile phones along the Nile in Egypt, and a silent black and white 16mm tableau of a solitary camel set on Öland's Alvar. Within the framework of the Bernadotte residency programme at the Royal Academy of Arts, both works draw from two historical points and interrogate institutional depiction in relation to travel narratives as constructed fiction.

In Vom Nil, the camera returns to the sites originally photographed by Queen Victoria of Baden (1862–1930), one of Sweden's first amateur photographers, whose collection is archived in the Bernadotte Library. Named after Baden's travelogue published in 1892, Vom Nil retraces these photographs from Port Said to Abu Simbel, following a route that parallels the emergence of mass tourism. Following the completion of the Suez Canal and the British occupation of Egypt, travel companies consolidated colonial routes, which in turn established the channels through which the site of 'Egypt' would be encountered in a Western imaginary. In the film, the periphery of these well-documented historical sites are reshot and reformulated for an estranged 21st century.

In the tableau, a lone camel appears on black-and-white 16mm film, situated beyond any specific geography or time. The scene was shot on Öland's alvar and serves as an allusion to David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl's (1628–1698) painting Camel with Driver (1688), which depicts the animal and its attendant in a landscape reminiscent of a fantasized Saharan topography. Today on display at Drottningholm Castle, it is thought to be the first depiction of a Muslim in Swedish art history, and inspired by an event in 1687 when Count Nils Bielke brought with him a dromedary and its Ottoman keeper to Sweden after the Battle of Mohács, Hungary. Investigating Ehrenstrahl's decision to situate his subjects within this orientalist landscape, Zouiten was led to a near-identical painting by Jan Asselijn (1610–1652) –a contemporary of Ehrenstrahl– portraying a solitary camel. A connection which in turn inspired the 16mm film where the figure is omitted, mirroring Ehrenstrahl's gesture of displacement through its geographical shift to the Alvar: a location with strong connotations to Swedish landscape painting of the 19th century.

Amin Zouiten was awarded a scholarship within the Bernadotte Program 2024.
> Read more