Short Abstract:

This lab invites participants to share experiences of relocation and mobility through creating a collaborative installation that focuses on limitations of a place and imagined possibilities of other places.

Long Abstract:

In this laboratory participants will create a collective conceptual map/meshwork that will encourage reflection on structural as well as emotional factors through which we experience places and move along a line within a meshwork of interwoven lines (Ingold, 2007). Relocating from one place to another requires an emotional flexibility to cope with continuities and disruptions, therefore, we are interested in how events, people and things interweave and create thematic knots and nodes of place experiences.

We will visualize these experiences through a dynamic weblike installation of colorful threads and other materials that will capture the complexities of be/longing to places in a person's present, past and future. This collaborative exercise will create correspondences between participants through sharing personal relocation/migration experiences and by identifying social, political, emotional and imaginative factors that shape these experiences. We aim to explore how utopian ideas and everyday duties intermingle, how opting for being somewhere else is practiced here and now, how people adapt their dreams to the circumstances, and how interlocking different narratives can create new possibilities for dialogue and self-reflection.