Translocal, Transnational, and Hybrid Spatial Spaces

We (Francesca Ceola and Simone Rueß) designed a processual multimedia workshop to encounter, reflect upon, and upend questions on translocality, of transnationalism, and of hybrid cultural and space-oriented structures. Working actively with the workshop room using time-based, graphic, and performative languages, we aimed to ground broad, abstract concepts in graspable experiences. We first got into the atmosphere of thinking visually by watching and discussing Camilo Bravo Molano’s audio-visual work “Liquid Homes”: a film portrait mapping a displaced person’s experience in Portugal. The participants were then invited to share ideas and explore possibilities to translate and elaborate on the broad concepts of translocality, transnationalism, and hybrid spatialities. We used graphic prompts, language, and performative explorations to enhance this embodied analysis that we developed both individually, then collectively. The workshop closed with a lecture by Prof. Dr. Magdalena Nowicka through a self-reflection on spatialities of migrants and transnational affect. She put in words aspects and differences of transnational and translocal homes introduced to us through Bravo Molano’s film images in the beginning of the workshop.

More to read about on our blogpost @sfb1265

Facing Pairs and Changing Dialogue Partners: A Drawing-Exchange in Transition

The participants were sitting along tables, in a line, in the room. In the middle of the tables, a line of drawings was laid out: to stimulate sensorial reflections including division, connection, detachment, leaving behind, and new beginnings. The lines drawn on paper represented a visual simplification of complex relationships of translocality, transnationality or hybridity. They could be associated with borders, border crossings, border dissolutions, and separation. The drawing paper and pens handed out to each participant invited personal pictorial reproductions, transformations, or further developments of the graphic proposals. Participants in pairs exchanged about the graphics lying between them in one moment, only to be urged to abandon the conversation at the next, leaving their exchanges behind, and proceeding to the following dialogue partner. Engaging in couple-of-minutes increments almost overwhelmed us with a threefold intensity: the sound of all engaged voices, the flow of ideas, and the frantic timing of conversation changes.

The series of drawings laid out on the tables to initiate and orient participants’ conversations were inspired by the artist Chiara Carrer’s book Pensar el espacio. Reflejos, superficies, y colores (transl. “Thinking the Space. Reflections, surfaces, and colors”). Some drawings are a direct re-interpretation of Chiara Carrer, while others were developed from the drawing research of Simone Rueß and her conversations on spatial imaginations with more than 30 interviewees from all over the world. (excerpt of the blogpost @sfb1265)

A Room with Borders, Barriers, and Open Forms: An Embodied Non-verbal Interaction

(...)

Participants were confronted with the challenge of having to leave their present position in the room to reach another point in the space, limited by the four structural walls but also some additional cardboard walls. Acting in their own space, participants initially imperceptibly created a common structure of changing distances in the room. Forms and shapes of paper left behind, foreign lines, and cut-outs found at the next position, they gradually triggered more conscious interactions with spatial traces of the others. One sequential letter after the other, local and migrated shapes formed fragile hybrid common figurations. (excerpt of the blogpost @sfb1265)

Islands of Creation and Synthesis: Individual and Collective Reflexion, drawings and ensembles by María Linares (1), anonymous participant (2), Ludovica Tomarchio (3), Workshop part 5, 2024.

Islands of Creation and Synthesis: Individual and Collective Reflections in a Shared Space

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The rapid, time-framed and place-constrained interactions explored during the workshop can be observed and were intentionally initiated as cues for refiguration of spatial, social, psychological, and cognitive (as in how associations of ideas are enhanced) arrangements and constellations that tell us something around concepts of translocality, transnationality, and hybrid cultural space-oriented structures. The setup of a laboratory with sequential tasks and reflection allowed us to grasp the nature of these spatial structures both in an abstract and elementary way. Film, verbal exchange, figurative language, movement, drawing, symbols, performance, objects, language, and lecture. In diverse media and transdisciplinary reflections, we looked at these formats and terms from various sides, as if we deconstructed their characters into multifaceted multiple layers. Thinking towards expanding the edges of the refiguration theory vis-à-vis territorial structures, we engaged with the diffracted meanings of translocalization with a postnationalist critique to explore practices, memories, and meaning-making at multiple levels: socio-material, ecological-economic, and symbolic-transcendent. As a result, the drift of notions, shifts, and hybridization were not just a conceptual exercise but also a figurative and embodied one". (Conclusion in our blogpost @sfb1265)

ZUHAUSE/HOME

People with experiences of flight and migration often create a new home in temporary forms of housing such as container villages. At the same time, they remain connected to their homeland through memories and contacts with those “back home,” while seeking ways to live out their cultural everyday needs.

In a workshop at Kunsthalle Tübingen, I invited participants from Afghanistan, Albania, Armenia, Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Pakistan to share memories of a home, to explore mental images of their current (hybrid) home, and to imagine visions of a future form of living. These individual ideas were captured in a collective large-scale drawing and documented in a video – both as a creative process and as a vision of communal life.

Menschen mit Flucht- und Migrationserfahrung schaffen sich meist in temporären Wohnformen wie Containerdörfern ein neues Zuhause. Gleichzeitig bleiben sie über Erinnerungen und Kontakte zu „Daheimgebliebenen“ mit ihrer Heimat verbunden und suchen nach Möglichkeiten, ihre kulturellen Alltagsbedürfnisse zu leben. In einem Workshop in der Kunsthalle Tübingen lud ich Teilnehmer*innen aus Afghanistan, Albanien, Armenien, Türkei, Irak, Libanon, Nigeria und Pakistan ein, Erinnerungen an ein Zuhause zu teilen, mentale Bilder eines derzeitigen (hybriden) Zuhauses zu erkunden und Visionen einer zukünftigen Wohnform zu imaginieren. Diese individuellen Vorstellungen wurden in einer gemeinsamen großformatigen Zeichnung festgehalten und in einem Video dokumentiert – als kreativer Prozess und als Vision eines kollektiven Zusammenlebens.

In addition, together with the participants, we explored their inner images of home in narrative interviews, which I then translated into drawings. In this way, mental spatial images emerged that make visible both personal sensitivities, hybird identities and the socio-spatial conditions of refugees.

Ergänzend ergründete ich zusammen mit den Teilnehmer*innen in narrativen Interviews deren innere Bilder vom Wohnen, welche ich anschließend in eigene Zeichnungen übersetzte. So entstanden mentale Raumbilder, die persönliche Befindlichkeiten, hybride Identitäten, ebenso wie sozial-räumliche Gegebenheiten Geflüchteter sichtbar machen.

Blaue luftdurchlässige Wolke (vor März 2020), I

Przestrzeń Działań Społecznych

In the workshop led by Simone Rueß, a collective map was created based on a performative exploration of urban space. The starting point were mental images of selected spaces of Katowice and performative and linguistic interactions with places such as the train station, the shopping center and the pedestrian zone.

The aim was to draw attention to the network of socio-spatial relationships in Katowice. According to Martina Löw's relational spatial concept, space is a constantly changing arrangement of people, other living beings, goods and architectural objects. This space is synthesized through the processes of
perception, imagination and memory.

Furthermore, Simone Rueß' concept for the workshop was based on Kevin Lynch's (1960) idea of the mental image of the city and Grzegorz Kowalski's theory and teaching of the “own/common space”. (Excerpt summary of the workshop at NIAiU, Warsaw)

In dem von Simone Rueß geleiteten Workshop wurde eine kollektive Karte auf Basis einer performativen Erforschung des städtischen Raums erstellt. Ausgangspunkt waren mentale Bilder ausgewählter Räume von Katowice und performative und sprachliche Interaktionen mit Orten wie dem Bahnhof, dem Einkaufszentrum und der Fußgängerzone. Ziel war es, die Aufmerksamkeit auf das Netz der sozialräumlichen Beziehungen in Katowice zu lenken. Nach Martina Löws relationalem Raumkonzept zufolge ist der Raum eine sich ständig verändernde Anordnung von Menschen, anderen Lebewesen, Waren und architektonischen Objekten. Dieser Raum wird durch die Prozesse der Wahrnehmung, der Vorstellung und der Erinnerung synthetisiert. Simone Rueß‘ Konzept für den Workshop stützte sich außerdem auch auf Kevin Lynchs (1960) Idee des mentalen Bildes der Stadt sowie auf Grzegorz Kowalskis Lehre vom „Eigenen/Gemeinsamen Raum“. (Ausschnitt Zusammenfassung des Workshops at NIAiU, Warschau: https://niaiu. pl/2024/05/przestrzen-dzialan-spolecznych-podsumowanie-warsztatow/)

Cityscape Nowa Huta

"Based on the insights I received during the conversations and narrative mappings of residents along my first tour through the city (Nowa Huta), I revisited and approached selected locations in greater detail (Lynch 1960, 15). I stood with my mobile table at six locations for a longer duration of time (approximately two to three hours), scanning the visual field and documenting the multiplicity of moments as layers of strokes and lines on a single sheet of paper (Figure 4). The live drawings were simultaneously filmed from above and later digitally sped up in videos and superimposed. Inverted to white on black, like an X-ray, the time-based images illuminate ‘a view of bodies seen through and beyond their skins’—that is, a view of environmental structures seen through their surfaces (Rueß 2023a, 89). Built on my artistic practice, I used the method of overlaying drawn movements into simultaneity to reveal the so-called movement space in relation to the architecture, environments, and their histories."

excerpt: Simone Rueß (2025). Performance Drawing: Uncovering Multiple Timescapes of Nowa Huta, In: Spacetimes Matter. A Collection of Mapping Methodologies. Baxter, Jamie-Scott / Heinrich, Anna Juliane / Marguin, Séverine / Sommer, Vivien (Eds.), Jovis: Berlin.

Os. Stalowe, excerpt of the installation 'city/sound/scape' by Simone Rueß and Rafał Mazur.

^_References:

`_{^{Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press. Rueß, Simone. 2023a. ‘Drawing and (Re)Acting: The Creation of Movement Spaces’. Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice 8 (1): pp. 81–94. https://doi.org/10.1386/drtp_00107_1.}}`

Rosafarbene Wolke (März 2020)

Hinterm Schlagzeug und eine Person im Publikum

Patelnia

Streams of passers-by stretch out in spatial relation to each other. You move beside other people, encountering other pedestrians, following someone in the same direction, sometimes even using the same trace as the person in front of you - just unconsciously, approaching somebody or meeting someone in the plaza; you leave buildings or objects behind you, and so on. The layout of the plaza influences the movements through its structure and organization. But it is not only the layout and the architecture that gives the place its structure. It is the movement and all the spatial relations in between all the moving subjects and objects that give the central plaza its intrinsic logic. In the Patelnia underground, the metropolitan element of Warsaw clashes with its provincial element (Joanna Kusiak, 2012: ...). Street sellers, standing in the middle of the platform, have an impact on the movement of the Varsovians rushing to metro station on their way to work.

Red Carpet

Each individual in a city is creating his/her own movement space inside a huge pattern of a common urban structure that is written unconsciously into the collective memory. This Red Carpet shows the symmetrical ground plan of Plac Defilad and the Palace of Culture and Science in its middle in the centre of Warsaw. Built as a gift from the Soviet Union in socialist classicism from 1952 to 1955, many Poles have an ambivalent feeling to this place and building. The over-sized cut-out of the red carpet, that I have taken from the congress hall of the Palace of Culture and Science, relates how deeply the urban and temporal structure of the central square mark the city centre and how deeply its structure has been imprinted in the collective memory of Varsovian (from 1952 – 2016). Today, the Museum of Modern Art is being built here and changes the spatial impression enormously.

Kręgosłup

In the middle of the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, which marks the centre of the capital city, there is a system that shows similarities to the spinal column of the human body. In the midpoint of the palace tower are 12 elevator shafts in which people are transported daily to 43 floors. The work abstracts the space within the architecture of these elevators, a space which the people occupy and define over time through their usage of the moving lifts, getting in and out at the different floors. Dismembered in its seperate vertebrae, the spinal column is lying on the floor, as if an organ has been removed from the body and relieved of its normal function. And so, the observer has the chance to examine the spine with his own eyes.

Hinterm Schlagzeug und eine Person im Publikum

Patelnia

All spaces moving with me

Continuity

Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.Rueß, Simone. 2023a. ‘Drawing and (Re)Acting: The Creation of Movement Spaces’. Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice 8 (1): pp. 81–94. https://doi.org/10.1386/drtp_00107_1.

`_{^{Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press. Rueß, Simone. 2023a. ‘Drawing and (Re)Acting: The Creation of Movement Spaces’. Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice 8 (1): pp. 81–94. https://doi.org/10.1386/drtp_00107_1.}}`