Movement & Communication

With the proliferation of means of movement and communication, and with the lure of always being elsewhere, we are continuously torn from the here and now. Hop on an intercity or commuter train, pick up a telephone — in order to be already gone. Such mobility only ever means uprootedness, isolation, exile. It would be insufferable if it weren’t always the mobility of a private space, of a portable interior. The private bubble doesn’t burst, it floats around. The process of cocooning is not going away, it is merely being put into motion. From a train station, to an office park, to a commercial bank, from one hotel to another, there is everywhere a foreignness, a feeling so banal and habitual it becomes the last form of familiarity."

————The Coming Insurrection

“There is in truth nothing progressive at all in a ‘laissez faire’ approach to migration which relies for its logic on an extreme neo-liberal position that people should fight ‘dog eat dog’ for economic opportunities wherever they can find them in an unregulated global economy. A new fairer world economic order is not going to be built on this approach. Neither is it persuasive to take the line that because developed, former imperialist powers like the UK have helped to create such an unjust world, mass migration would solve the problem...It is through the pursuit of trade justice, improved governance and economic redistribution that a fairer world will be achieved, not through huge disorganised movements of people.”

————Is the progressive case for migration truly progressive?

“The forthcoming enlargement of the European Union to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe makes it necessary to examine these projects [that "make a big contribution to the mobility of artists, be they students or teachers, in the Community"] and in any event prompts reflection on how to ward off the adverse consequences of the social dumping currently witnessed and involving the nationals of some of these countries. A problem unanimously condemned by the persons interviewed.”

————Study of the Mobility and Free Movement of People and Products in the Cultural Sector

This project is for anyone interested in engaging with the dragons that dwell at the intersections of place, mobility, communication and identity.