I just came back from a summer camp. I’m 27 but felt 13 again. The workshop embodied the utopian freedom that physical mobility often creates: people, togetherness, openness, creativity, and mutual discovery of the space surrounding us. It was Intimate Tourism at it’s finest.
I admit, I went into it not really knowing anything about the format or my exact purpose for going there – all I knew was that it was being organized by a Berlin-based gallery and non-profit art association called Uqbar – Society for Representation Research. I spent the 8 days in a hotel in Palanga, on the Lithuanian Baltic, being the only sociologist there – the rest were performance artists, photographers, intervention artists, painters, and architects. We all were interested in mobility-related issues and used the town of Palanga as our workspace, canvas, atelier, social universe in which to create works which would interest us and hopefully those beyond our workshop.
My specific workshop (there were three to choose from) was led by Austrian architect and curator, Michael Zinganel, who, funnily enough, is part of the Cosmobilities research network and met one of my supervisors in Munich at their last conference. The aim of his workshop was to develop on location a “first draft” of an intervention, performance or installation on the mobilities theme; and at best, the realization of a further stage – a “work in progress”. I worked on a project with Asa Elzen – a Swedish artist based in New York.
Asa and I agreed that the concept of tourist is entangled in an identity of consumption of a place and the tourist rarely becomes a producer, giver, creator in that given place. We wanted to find a way to give gifts or provide services for the people in Palanga. This would be something they needed. Something that didn’t disrupt their daily pattern of living. We really wanted to try to avoid common artistic strategies to get in touch with ‘natives’: the use of disguise, manipulations, or a staged performance. We decided to use the weather as a way of creating contact between us and the strangers in Palanga. We would take out an umbrella and offer people shelter from the rain. And in the sunny days, we went on the beach, and offered people a bit of our sunscreen. This work helped us untangle relational issues between mobile/local as they relate to intimacy/closeness, giving/taking, producing/creating. We documented our meetings in writing and hope to develop this project further.
And so, my take on reality expanded yet again. I learned a lot about other ways of representing and communicating research, and just the thought of developing the project ideas with the truly talented artists I met last week makes me giddy.
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