Golnar Touski and Paula Kupfer Colloquium

“Mobility and Exchange Constellation: Plans and Ideas”

Please join Golnar Touski and Paula Kupfer to discuss tentative plans and events for the Mobility and Exchange Constellation. We will share our proposed activities and discuss future events.

“Creativity frequently springs from the movement of people, ideas, and objects across frontiers and boundaries and into places deemed new, foreign, strange, or remote. These encounters produce highly charged, often violent, contact zones, stimulating the desire to collect, to map, to trade, and to possess. We investigate the things that result from such encounters and the ways in which these things affect the people who make, recreate, and use them.” (Constellations.pitt.edu)

The future of Mobility and Exchange Constellation could be envisioned as an expansion of the passage above via key terms of mapping, collecting, moving and possessing; and in dialogue with processes of empiricism as well as the circulation of people and objects. As Rebecca Solnit wrote in Wanderlust, “Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedoms and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.” We propose walking as core practice of the constellation: an act of mobilizing bodies where we exchange ideas, perform in public space, read poetry and theory together, or simply move as a group. Walking to us will be a way of keeping the constellation alive, from whence plans and ideas emerge or converge with exhibitions, talks, and texts.

Image details:
Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002
(c) Francis Alÿs