chapter
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.