GEOGRAPHY AND THE POLITICS OF MOBILITY

GEOGRAFIE UND DIE POLITIK DER MOBILITÄT | 2003

In the last years the concept of Geography undergoes a fundamental transofmration. The
increasing circulation of people, goods, and data create new cultural, social, and virtual
landscapes, which can not be described by traditional geo-scientific categories. This
publication documents projects of five international art collectives, which pursue questions of
global miration, changing work environments, and worldwide information systems, and
outline alternative models for a new geographic praxis. Art scholars Irit Rogoff, Brian
Holmes and media theorist Lisa Parks critically enlight in their theoretical essays the
metaphor of Geography towards a new level of knowledge.
With art projects by Bureau d’étude, Frontera Sur RRVT, Macrolab, multiplicity and
Raqs Media Collective.

Geography and the Politics of Mobility

Ursula Biemann

Introduction

The exhibition pursues questions around the transformative quality of locations and
geographies at a time when subjects are no longer bound to one particular place. Rather than
focussing on the formation of dislocated subjectivities due to global migration or the
participation in virtual world-wide activities, Geography and the Politics of Mobility will look
at the way places are being constituted through them. One of the recurring questions will be
how the human trajectories and the traffic of signs and visual information form particular
cultural and social landscapes and inscribe themselves materially in the terrain. Spatial and
geographic thinking has gained significance in postmodernism and has become, in the course
of globalization, a crucial and most welcome tool of analysis. Geography as a discipline of
geophysics is not what interests us here, but the postmodern understanding of geography as a
distinct mode of producing and organizing knowledge regarding the way natural, social and
cultural conditions relate to one another. The model operates as a theoretical platform from
which to think about society in a networked, complex and spatially expanded way that
includes concepts of boundaries, connectivity, and transgression. Even though everything
seems to be a part of world systemic processes and global networks, the notion of place and
location remains important in all this. Only this “place”, or at least the way we conceive of it
today, has undergone some major transformation. Geography examines places, which are
constituted not only by people who inhabit them, but by connections and movements of all
sorts that traverse them on a variety of scales, ranging from local, private and intimate
processes to public, economic, transnational and systemic ones.
We notice an abundance of images of fluid, unfixed, and transitional identities in circulation
at present. These increasingly recognized qualities of identity are partially a result of
transgender discourses but also of cybermobility and physical migration as well as a general
increase in travelling and repeated or multiple chains of human movement. (1) No doubt, the
fast spread of information technologies and the liberalizaton of post-socialist countries had a
definitive impact on the mobility of people since the early 90ies. But migration has always
existed and travelling people too, only these phenomena have been examined as particularities
from the view of the experience of the stable, settled, productive citizen. Today, the stable,
settled and legalized subject is no longer the focal subject matter in recent critical cultural
writing. It also doesn’t accurately describe the conditions of many writers, artists and other
cultural producers any longer. Both the theorizing subject and the object of interest seem to be
temporarily stationed in a “transit lounge,” to use James Clifford’s words, their position
destabilized, and in motion. (2) We may indeed ask what is actually in crisis, the material
setting out there or the academic discipline that provokes a new fascination with conditions
that reflect its own state of instability. Let’s assume it is a combination of the two. In any case,
the focus is on translocal existencies, on transformative cultural practices, and on the
movement itself, on the politics of mobility.
In an immediate geographic sense, the exhibition traces the logic of particular human
economic circuits in a changed world order: the female teleservice industries in India, illegal
refugee boats entering the Mediterranean Sea, the European industrial prison complex, the
smuggling paths across the Spanish-Moroccan border. These sites and non-sites speak of a
rearticulation of the relations between social and territorial conditions.
On another level, the exhibition maps various forms of collaborations and temporary alliances
practiced by artists and other cultural producers who are engaged in assembling and
producing knowledge about how these circuits operate, how they are reiterated discursively
and semiotically, and how they mark and give meaning to the space they traverse. Geography
deals with cultural and operational systems, which are conceivable and representable in
geographic terms. The cultural agents, i.e. the participating artists and writers, are perfectly
aware that they are personally involved in writing a geography that contributes to the building
of the very space they describe.
The exhibition space may be looked at as one such transient location whose meaning is
generated through the passage of people and the appearance of temporary projects, which may
inscribe themselves, over time, in form of a program, into the space. None of the works
represent closed positions, they rather open up the networks within which they have been
generated and of which they are an operative part. Each one of the projects gives insight into a
system, which is as much a system of navigation than a system of representation.
The transformation I want to address in this exhibition, then, also encompasses a certain
discursive shift in the way location and dislocation can be conceptualized and talked about
today. The diasporic identity as a subject with a history, a concept developed in valuable
intellectual and artistic work during the last decade, will no longer serve as a conceptual
framework for this new cartography. A theoretical platform that articulates gender, subject,
mobility and space, and a visual language, which can speak of a hyper-mobile, capitalized,
gendered body needs to be invented. Geographic bodies. Bodies with a travel schedule.
Itinerary identities that grind their routes into the land.
The shift from a historical to a geographic discourse in this area has been particularly
appreciated by those scholars and cultural producers who are engaged in issues of
globalization and migration. When spatial interests in cultural discourses have been largely
aimed at cyberspace, urban structures, and the workplace, I would like to see these concerns
extend to the global technological geography that constitutes the environment for a constant
migration of gendered bodies. The exhibition then traces the navigation of people through
material as well as electronic terrain, actively engaged in communicating, networking,
laboring, informing, servicing and searching. In this instance, with electronic landscape I
means both the electronic communications networks and the landscapes visually generated by
satellite media and other geographic information systems. The collapse of these two spaces
into one dynamic and highly gendered geography is present in many of the works and will be
further evidenced by the way they correspond to each other in the exhibition context.
Electronic landscapes have increasingly become the surface for action. Besides grasping the
material topographies of the earth, satellite images also record the invisible elements of
atmospheric, underwater and subterranean formations, as implemented recently in the military
reconnaissance of the cave network of Al Quaida. Representing a traversable space, satellite
images are no longer the map of a static moment in time but a dynamic geography of moving
and changing surfaces over which a steady flow of signals and data is recording human
migration, refugee movements and border crossings. These migrations are registered and
evaluated for scientific purposes with entail political consequences. But the control of flows
always takes place within the regime of meaning e.g. the old culture is threatened by the
influx of foreigners. It is a cultural domain. Even the most technologically produced images
will be filtered, at the moment of interpretation, by human fantasies, desires and projections,
as Lisa Parks exposes in her analysis of the remotely sensed discovery of Cleopatra’s
underwater palace.(3) A possible aesthetic strategy, then, does not seek to intervene in the
production of the image, but in the production of knowledge derived from the visual data. The
essay on Global Positioning Satellites, contributed by Parks to this volume, imagines
alternative ways and finds personal and creative applications for these technologies. In her
practice, she embodies a new generation of media scholars, who undertakes fieldwork along
the highways of Southern California,Australian tourist trails and in the borderlands between
Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia, exposing and commenting on her own positionality in the
thorough manner of a feminist geographer who fluctuates between researcher and consumer,
observer and participant, imperialist and tourist. She demonstrates how by inscribing the
materiality of human movement into the discourse of cartography, the GPS map brings global
positioning and social positionality together. They reveal a particular intervisuality in
displaying “beings of movement” located somewhere between the objective map of territory
and the subjective experience of motion on the ground.
The appropriation of high capital technologies for cultural low-tech uses is also at the core of
Makrolab, one of the five collective projects in the exhibition. Initiated by Slovenian artist
Marko Peljhan in 1997, the self-built, spacey structure is a nomadic, temporary, sustainable
research station designed to listen in to data from around the world from locations in remote
and fragile environments. The lab provides hightech communication facilities in alien,
survivalist living conditions. Inviting artists and scientists to develop projects that relate to the
particular setting, Makrolab sets up an intense biosphere among the participants who agreed
to live and work together in a very reduced space over a number of weeks, resulting in a web
of related studies and artworks. The last Makrolab was located on the Scottish highlands from
May through July 2002, the next one is planned to be held in the Antarctic.
As a form of “living between an online and offline world in time zones on the outer reaches of
cyberia,” Raqs Media Collective describes the gendered conditions of the new data
outsourcing agent, the digital proletarian: the online working woman who is the quintessential
twenty first century worker. Conceived specifically for this exhibition, their video and text
piece A/S/L (Age/Sex/Location) maps the time geography of shifting identities in a new
economy, where call center employees who are physically located in India answer customers
in Minneapolis in a Midwestern accent. Moving between these worlds and their respective
cultural and economic terms, while at the same time carving out a personal space of agency
and pleasure for oneself becomes the existential challenge for these women.
Two projects set a European focus in the exhibition. As an initiative for Geography with a life
expectation that will hopefully extend beyond the exhibition, Frontera Sur RRVT (the
European Southern Border in Real Remote and Virtual Time) is not a formal collective but a
loose group of artists and activists who are taking a look at one exemplary geographic site and
its multiple strata of meaning. The site is the European Southern rim – La Frontera Sur, the
Spanish-Moroccan border area. In a variety of artistic and thematic approaches, the project
examines a region in which questions of gender, ethnic filters, migration and labor debates as
well as civil initiatives, claims for the public sphere and technological control mechanisms
correlate on a small territory. This place is not about a simple line but a complex system of
forces that strive towards constituting the meaning of an entity called Europe.
multiplicity proposes an extended study of the Solid Sea project on the nature of the
Mediterranean Sea, on the fluxes that cross it and on the identities of the individuals that
inhabit it. They critically contradict the prevalent soft notions of the Mediterranean as a “lieu
de rencontre,” the blending of traditions, the cradle of distinct yet connected cultures. While
Europe is passing through a period of uncertainty and reformulation of borders, multiplicity
proposes to look at the Mediterranean as a solid space that is criss-crossed at different depths
and according to different vectors, by tourists, immigrants or refugees holding a different
status.
Bureau d’études takes the politics of space on a higher level of abstraction. The artist duo
conceives gigantic maps that show an increasingly interconnected network of data-gathering
systems involving the military, energy and biochemical sectors as well as the entertainment,
information and social surveillance systems. In contrast to the geographic map which is an
analog representation that grounds in a phenomenological reading of space, the organigram is
a digital and structural representation, which seems more adequate in representing the real,
which can no longer be grasped by photogaphy. The pictographic arrangements in their piece
don’t worry be happy reveal an interlocking order which suggests a high degree of complexity.
The accompanying handout folder cosmology provides a viewer’s guide to the networks of
cooperation, power, normalization and property, which makes no attempt at simplifying the
matter.
A highly discursive project, Geography includes a program of events, discussions and
screenings with the purpose of further linking artistic expressions to the theoretical and
political debates they stand in dialog with. Among them is the cyberfeminist web project
womanspacework, which is conceived as a communication and mediation platform for
existing internet projects and other initiatives run by women with the purpose of bringing
together artistic, theoretical and activist practices. Republicart, based in Vienna, is a research
project and an initiative towards a transnational network of politically driven art interventions
in the public sphere. And finally there will be a screening of my video essay Remote Sensing,
a topography of the global sex trade with a guest speaker from an Austrian organisation
dealing with female migration and the international trade in humans.
Geography is an exhibition about the transformation of space. Within the specificities of the
concept, the term transformation also relates to the changing interdiscursive configuration
between art and geography. If the academic discipline of geography as been unable to
represent the major changes that have occurred in the post-colonial, post-migratory and post-
communist world, can art rewrite geography’s relations with place and mobility? This is one
of the questions asked by Irit Rogoff in her enlightening book Terra Infirma, which has been a
steady companion in the development of this project (4). The exhibition follows Rogoff’s
tracks in that it engages in the problematic of geography and proposes a reading of the present
transfer of the geographic signifying practice into art discourses and the alternative artistic
strategies which have emerged over the last years. Curating, the way I understand it, is an
extended form of my own artistic practice. It does not involve touring Europe to scan the
major art shows for exciting discoveries. I have been personally involved with some of the
projects included in Geography, have entered their network or initiated new cooperations with
Spanish artists and Moroccan activists, for instance, who work on the politics on the Straight
of Gibraltar, both through connective and transgressive activities. Together with Lisa Parks
we spent 2 weeks on the drafty Scottish highlands last summer, immersing ourselves in the
Makrolab biosphere that is composed of extreme working and living conditions. I have the
chance to participate in Irit Rogoff’s research project European Conversations on Cultural
Difference through which a network of progressive cultural producers and policy makers is
established. And there will be future collaborations ensuing from this project. The
permeability of the activities defined as curatorial, scholarly, artistic and activist is
recognizable in every one of the projects, in every contributing lecture. The main purpose of
the exhibition, then, is not to show final artworks but to give insight into a networked art and
intellectual community who shares a common concern with the European politics of border
closure, with the new forms of consolidation of power and the gendered shifts in the global
labor. The central questions of state, security and the production of difference is taken up by
Irit Rogoff in her attempt of rethinking the relations of global power by proposing to think
“terror” through another set of parameters. Setting visual culture as the arena, her text
Engendering Terror carefully reads terror and the archive of earlier resistance practices, anti-
colonial wars and urban guerilla movements, as an alternative relational geography, a set of
geographical ambivalences in which the nation state is unframed. By linking radical
movements that took place in different geographies who shared theoretical precepts and
mutual engagements in the second half of the 20th century, Rogoff cuts diagonally through
post-colonial time-space to arrive at a spatialized reading of history. What her analyses of the
case of RAF terrorist Gudrun Ensslin and more recent incidents of female Palestinian suicide
bombers brings to light is that terror and its forms of representation is a highly gendered
matter where concepts of femininity and terrorism have to be resignified.
Another kind of counter-geography is written by Brian Holmes who explores the way in
which increasingly large-scale collaborative performance and conceptual art projects
performatively map out the new locations and forms of institutional power in the Global Days
of Action. His questions about the role that specialized art practices and institutional spaces
can still play, as sites of production, reflection, exchange and archiving, but also as sites
where the debate over the transformation of values becomes explicit, reflect the overall
inquiry of the exhibition.
1 McDowell, Linda (1999) Gender, Identity and Place – Understanding Feminist Geographies,
University of Minnesota Press. The last chapter Displacements focuses on movement and
travelling.
2 Clifford, James (1997) Routes – Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century,
Harvard University Press
3 Parks, Lisa (2003) Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and Television, Duke University Press
4 Rogoff, Irit (2000) Terra Infirma – Geography’s Visual Culture, Routlegde
Specs
212 pages with many images in b/w and in color, 16,5×23 cm