See You There
We live in a time that offers seemingly boundless opportunities for travel and connection, yet paradoxically, we are more lonely and divided than ever. Dating apps conjure romance within a chosen radius; GPS offers pathways to dreamy holiday destinations; while generative AI interprets unfamiliar sounds into digestible multilingual summaries. Marks of time and space have bent to market desires; outer space travel has become the next horizon for conspicuous consumption; while we keep investing in the illusory capacity to commercialise all forms of human experience.
In a context of global climate crisis and widening economic disparity, the eco-social cost of global mobility is impossible to ignore. The occupation of placescolonised lands and global movement of bodiesdisplaced peoples through conflicts and environmental disasters, sits in stark contrast to the techno-utopian reveries of oligarchs. For many, the everyday experience of a technologically-mediated community increasingly complicates and confuses perceptionsa sense of belonging to one, or any, place on this earth. At the same time, contemporary technologies may offer vital networks of support and distributed spaces for deep connection that should not be underestimated.
How do we find community and connection, in an ever expanding and complex spatial imaginary? What are the images, ideas and questions that shape our multilayered sense of belonging today?
See you there is a publishing project that facilitates contemporary conversations about space, place, community and mobility. Through a series of linked interventions, it showcases the work of a selected group of international practitioners to provoke reflection about how and where we might find our communities (and at what cost).
Travel bags
For Ursula K. Le Guin, stories serve as ‘carrier bags’ to gather and share knowledge. They are woven through complex fibres of word and image, and form a fundamental technology for human survival. For the editors of See You There, the ‘travel bag’ offers a way to re-imagine knowledge exchange, connection and creation. It reflects an incomplete process that holds images and ideas, which are transported between people and places.
On April 11th 2024, a group of artists, theorists, designers and curators met at the Centre Wallonie Bruxelles (CWB). Some travelled across countries, continents and hemispheres, while others arrived on foot. In the CWB theatre, they shared stories and unravelled urgent questions about living across new frontiers of space, community, ecology and technology. How do we situate ourselves in today’s complex and ever expanding, technologically mediated space? How do we find one another (whoever we are), once we are there?
‘Travel Bags: 9 Pockets for Celestial Bodies/Terrestrial Beings’, responds to the tradition of publishing conference proceedings, offering a generous carrier bag for the concepts, images and questions gathered through the bilingual (English and French spoken) colloquium ‘Celestial Bodies/Terrestrial Beings.’ Published as a series of postcards and an online syllabus, it is the first experiment by See you there, which seeks to consider how knowledge weaves diverse paths across the globe.
Contributors
Golnaz Behrouznia
Amélie Bouvier
Annick Bureaud
Louise Charlier
Natacha Duviquet
Manuela de Barros
Inte Gloerich
Vidya-Kelie Juganaikloo
Adriana Knouf
Ania Molenda
Elise Morin
Plant Sex Consultancy (Pei-Ying Lin, Dimitris Stamatis, Jasmina Weiss Špela Petrič)
Baden Pailthorpe
Denise Thwaites