See You There
See You There
See you there/On se voit là-bas/ Zie je daar is a curatorial publishing project that brings together works from visual arts, literature, digital media and spatial design to navigate complexities of place and mobility. Through a series of linked interventions (mini-publications such as zines, maps, postcards, websites or audio-stories), it showcases the work of practitioners from Canberra, Paris and Rotterdam, to provoke reflections about how, and where we find our community (and at what cost). Using a bricolage of multilingual text, image and sound, the project will interlace different formats such as speculative micro-fiction, poetry, maps, photography and illustration to highlight the many avenues through which connections to place may unfold.
We live in a time that presents seemingly boundless opportunities for travel; our GPS sets trajectories to placesdistant lands via car; Taylor Swift’s private jet speeds between NFL and Pop stadia; while Musk and Bezos compete for dominance in space tourism markets. But in a context of global climate crisis and widening economic disparity, the cost of such mobility becomes impossible to ignore. At the same time, the occupation of colonised lands, global movement of bodiesdisplaced peoples and technologically mediated experiences of community render perceptionsa sense of belonging to one, or any place(s) increasingly fraught. In this context, See you there/On se voit la-bas/ Zie je daar asks: How do we re-imagine places for community connection, amid such complexity?
This publication is developed as a collaboration between Denise Thwaites (curator and theorist of contemporary digital arts, University of Canberra), Manuela de Barros (curator, philosopher and art writer, Universite Paris 8), Ania Molenda (director research and publishing platform Amateur Cities), and Inte Gloerich (cultural organiser and researcher, Institute of Network Cultures, NL) and an extended network of international creative peers, building on collaborations initiated through the program ‘Celestial Bodies/Terrestrial Beings’ as part of the Centre Wallonie Bruxelles’ Nova Biennale_XX in 2024, Paris. We seek funding to support the design, editing, mastering and publication of this project, which will be published by the Netherlands based platform, Amateur Cities and distributed by PhotoAccess ACT, KIOSK Rotterdam and through networks at Universite Paris 8 - Vincennes-Saint-Denis.
