"Where are you from?"
Project by Pat Badani


http://www.arts.ilstu.edu/~pbadani/where1.html

 

Keywords:
global media spaces, telematic performance, networked art, online communities, online video, public exploration of the private sphere, cultures/languages/identities, nomadism, better-life, visual ethnography.

Introduction:
"Where are you from?" synthesizes many of my personal explorations regarding the hybridisation of media around issues of place and belonging. The work questions the relationship of culture and technology that appear to characterize the world of globalisation: migration, nomadism, hybrid identities, language convergence, and electronic mediation. My aim is to explore where the "better life" is located in our mobile contemporary imagination. I was awarded an individual 2002 Canada Council Media Arts Research Grant to develop the project.

I conceived "Where are you from?" as a transnational interdisciplinary piece that will bring into play Broadband, IP protocol and large-scale connectivity. Video-taped stories from individuals in several world cities, will be Webcast Live during weekend performances. The project juxtaposes culture and technology to explore the boundaries between how we imagine the world and how that imagination influences understanding of our place within it. It is entwined with a set of existential concerns famously encapsulated in the title of the 1897 painting made by French Impressionist Paul Gauguin: "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?"

Specifically, I have chosen to frame the project around my personal geography in 6 cities. These cities are Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Paris. Because I have lived in these cities, they are not foreign or exotic locations for me. I am familiar with these places, the people that inhabit them and their languages. These cities occupy a relative relationship to notions of centrality or periphery in the cultural universe ­ that is to say, Buenos Aires may be a center in the imaginary of a migrant from Peru, but a periphery for a nomad/passer-by from Tokyo. On the other hand, a globalised center like Paris, contains numerous peripheries. I am interested in this intermingling of centers and peripheries as they relate to local and global environments. In my "Where are you from?" project, I seek to reveal these complex relationships in stories that integrate images of self and translocal experiences.

This Webcast project brings Live performance and creative media to a public space where citizens-at-large are able to shape the work. It offers networked experiences and the distribution of
culturally significant ideas about place and belonging beyond narratives of origin.

In each city, I will create communicational spaces in carefully selected locations where a hybrid population spends time: public buildings, parks or plazas. Using performance strategies, I will construct dialogical situations in a nomadic structure. Passersby are invited into this structure to share personal stories on the Internet to deterritorialized viewers world wide. I launch conversations with a simple question that everyone can relate to: "Where are you from?". Through my prompting, based on a system I have developed and tested through research in 3 languages and in 6 world cities, I involve the visitor in a discussion about a better life.

The project addresses the characteristics of globalised urban environments and their population, what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai fittingly calls the ethnoscape, that is to say "Šthe landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live". Further he adds: "This is not to say that there are no relatively stable communities and networks of kinship, friendship, work and leisure, as well as of birth, residence, and other filial forms. But it is to say that the warp of these stabilities is everywhere shot through with the woof of human motion, as more persons and groups deal with the realities of having to move or the fantasies of wanting to move". ("Modernity at Large", pp33)

 

Pat Badani