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

(...)

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)

Kręgosłup

18 October – 21 November 2010 at Galeria Studio, Palace of Culture, Warsaw

city/sound/scape (Nowa Huta)

Nowa Huta is a unique testimony to urban and social 're-figuration' in today's Europe. Originally designed from the top down as an ideological, socialist, and urban planningproject, Nowa Huta has been undergoing an ongoing economic and social transformationsince 1989. The accompanying geographical changes and the progressive changesof Kraków have led to new residents, different everyday activities, and altered patternsof movement. The audiosphere is also undergoing a profound transformation, whichis linked, for example, to the closure of the industrial context. In an interdisciplinarydialog, Simone Rueß and Rafał Mazur bring together analyses of urban structures andsoundscapes in the form of a hybrid mapping. Residents are invited to actively participateand reflect on their neighbourhoods in the context of local and global upheavals. An audio-visual 5-channel installation makes the artistic investigations spatio-temporally experienceable.

Nowa Huta ist ein einzigartiges Zeugnis einer urbanen und sozialen 'Re-Figuration' im heutigen Europa. Ursprünglich von oben herab als ideologisches, sozialistisches und städtebauliches Gesamtprojekt angelegt, erfährt Nowa Huta seit 1989 eine andauernde wirtschaftliche und soziale Umgestaltung. Die damit einhergehenden geographischen Veränderungen und die fortschreitende Polarisierung der Nachbarschaft mit Krakau, führen zu neuen Bewohner*innen, anderen Alltagsaktivitäten und veränderten Fortbewegungsstrukturen. Auch die Audiosphäre befindet sich in einem tiefgreifenden Wandel, der zum Beispiel mit dem Aussterben des industriellen Kontextes zusammenhängt. In einem interdisziplinären Dialog führen Simone Rueß und Rafał Mazur Analysen von Stadt- und Klanglandschaften in Form eines hybrid mappings zusammen. Bewohner*innen werden zur aktiven Teilnahme eingeladen ihren Stadtteil im Spannungsgefüge lokaler und globaler Umbrüche zu reflektieren. Eine audio-visuelle 5-Kanal-Installation macht die künstlerischen Untersuchungen raumzeitlich erfahrbar.

Common Movement Space, excerpt of the installation 'city/sound/scape' by Simone Rueß and Rafał Mazur

Daily Routes, 2023, performative and participative research action, July 6 - July 11, 2023, table on wheels, 100 x 100 cm, black map, transparent papier, marker, action-camera.

Daily Routes, 2023, performative and participative research action, July 6 - July 11, 2023, Aleja Róz, Nowa Huta.

St. Paul, Paris, 2015

Zwischenraum (eng. Intermediate Space), 2011/12

Passers-by between the main railway station and Patelnia in Warsaw, Poland.

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.

Kręgosłup, 2010

Sketch of the Movement Space inside the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw - the lifts:

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.

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

PKiN (Movement Space), 2010, lifts in the Palace of Culture, pencil on paper, 29.7x42 cm

Rome

2018, Adele Giacoia related the city Rome with the meaning of home and described it as a large, open labyrinth structure of books that you can walk through. 2020, the same city, Rome, was still connected with the meaning of „home“, but now Adele Giacoia created a mental image of a DNA-like structure, where you could only walk through mentally with the help of your memory.

Inhabit 2018/2020: During my residency and exhibition at the Triennale di Milano, 2018, I collected, in the form of narrative interviews, over 60 mental images of home, from people from Europe, Taiwan, Israel, etc. During the pandemic lockdown 2020, for many people, the home became the home office. Professional and private activities took all place in the same place. I met my interviewees of 2018 again, this time virtually, and I asked for their current mental image of home in times of pandemic lockdown. Transformed into drawings, the contrasts between the ideas of home from 2018 and 2020 are presented on posters at bus stops during the festival in public space "Adaptacje" in Gorzów Wielkopolskie, 2021.