#NOMADWAYSprojects

[nomadwayseu-blog]

Subjective Mapping? Oh, yes!

Yeah, 2017 starts well! Our project "Subjective Mapping" was approved by Erasmus+ and it will take place in France later this year! Just to tease you a bit... :P “Subjective Mapping” will invite 24 artists, educators and social workers to discover, represent, explore and learn from the emotional layer of our perception of space. The training in rural France will give participants the unique opportunity to experience and explore subjective mapping as a tool that they can later on use for community development.

The application will be soon open, so stay tuned. Here is more info about the project.

What is subjective mapping?

Maps hold unparalleled storytelling power. A map, unlike a photographic sketch, looks like the way we think. Cognitive science nowadays insists on the ability of our minds to create mental maps before we take snapshots, storing information and space representation in a schematic form. We only need a few lines, relations between elements, some dots marking important points – for a whole story of experiences to come alive in our imagination. The most wonderful appeal of maps, perhaps, is that it stores and expresses our emotions into minimalistic shapes. We want to explore the beautiful subjectivity of maps as a tool for intercultural understanding, inclusion and active participation, especially related to migration.

Installations, sculpture and collage

Artist Shannon Rankin does a brilliant work on this. She uses “the language of maps to explore the connections among geological and biological processes, patterns in nature, geometry and anatomy”. The subjective mapping is very much about the way you feel about a place or a journey. It tells a story and the story can be visualized in many ways.

She creates installations, collages and sculptures that use the language of maps to explore the connections among geological and biological processes, patterns in nature, geometry and anatomy. Using a variety of distinct styles she cuts, scores, wrinkles, layers, folds, paints and pins maps to produce revised versions that often become more like the terrains they represent. These new geographies explore notions of place, perception and experience, suggesting the potential for a broader landscape and inviting viewers to examine their relationships with each other and the world we share.

Image: “Pod” by Shannon Rankin, 2009

Drawing and typography

Stephen Walter has drawn gigantic maps of London and Liverpool in a sort of report of Situationist drifts (derives) experiencing the psychogeographies of those two cities. His maps are mostly constituted by doodles and words that places various neighborhoods and its characteristics but also his autobiographical feeling about those places when he went there. Space’s representation and narratives are then completely colliding in one document and make S. Walter’s maps fascinating!

Image: Stephen Walker “Hub”, 2007-10

Mira Rojanasakul is questioning borders with her pen and ink. She writes “Herds, flocks, dots must abide not only to the limitations produced by natural geographies, but also the borders invented by man -- regardless of how "imaginary" they are. Suggested movements and these populations' relationship to their surroundings are intended to depict a silent resistance carried out unknowingly, simply because they have been programmed throughout the generations to move as they must to survive - whether the journeys end at better feeding grounds and survivable climates, or freer nations with better wages. There's a beauty in the numbers - each "speck" incapable of seeing or knowing what our false birds eye view of the world offers.”

Image: subjective cartography by Mira Rojanasakul.

Photographic Maps

Sohei Nishino is using photographs to compose his maps from aerial views by assembling pictures together despite their different vanishing points. He chose some very generic photographs from main monuments of each city to make the map more recognizable but one could imagine his work with an approach more similar to Stephen Walter’s that would assemble pieces of life brought together with personal pictures that would eventually constitutes the city.

Amazing - just look at the details on his website here!

Image: Sohei Nishino “Bern” 2012

"Mapping Manhattan”

How about collecting the subjective perceptions of a super famous place? Artist Becky Cooper did just that!

She was on a mission to explore Manhattan through an ongoing collaborative art project that began in an appropriately personal manner: Cooper became an accidental cartographer when she was hired to help map all of Manhattan’s public art. As she learned about mapping and obsessively colourcoded the locations, she considered what it took to make “a map that told an honest story of a place” and was faced with the inevitable subjectivity of the endeavor, realizing that an assemblage of many little subjective portraits revealed more about a place than any attempt at a “complete” map. 

And so the idea was born: to assemble a collaborative portrait of the city based on numerous individual experiences, memories, and subjective impressions. She painstakingly hand-printed a few hundred schematic maps of Manhattan on the letterpress in the basement of her college dorm, then walked all over the island, handing them to strangers and asking them to draw “their Manhattan,” then mail the maps back to her, which, in a heartening antidote to Gotham’s rumored curmudgeonly cynicism, they readily did. Dozens of intimate narratives soon filled her inbox: first loves, last goodbyes, childhood favorites, unexpected delights. In short, lives lived. 

This helped her constitute a tender cartographic love letter to this timeless city of multiple dimensions, parallel realities, and perpendicular views, featuring contributions from both strangers and famous New Yorkers alike.

Image: examples of subjective maps of Manhattan, NYC - “Mapping Manhattan” by Becky Cooper

_

Do you want to create something like this? Applications for “Subjective Mapping” in France will open soon. Keep an eye ;-)

[nomadwayseu-blog]

#MoveMovie: The Movies! The Creations!

“I Move, You Move, Everybody Moves for Movies” was a remarkable experience for Nomadways team and, we would like to believe, for our amazing participants too. It was emotional, experimental, full of learning, full of art and creativity… Important issues were discussed and represented in our creations as we were not able to stay blind to the events happening in the world while the project took place. 

In 20 days, 20 amazing artists did together an anthropological experience where they explored the village in search for its raw beauty and peculiarities. We wanted to show the locals how amazing their natural habitat is and its hidden value. We wanted to address the main challenges of the local life - the distance of the city, the less opportunities young people have in those rural areas and the depopulation issue. 

The result was: 6 short films, 1 photography portrait and 1 booklet that uncovers the secrets of MoveMovie.

(Editorial notes by Miguel Stichini, Anne Merlin and Karolina Ufa)

The project

"A year. How can one measure the changes in the world in a year? If we take a step back, distance ourselves from this project, it might seem quite pretentious of us to be developing a project about rurality, when outside the world is falling apart. However a little bite more than year ago we were far away to even consider that we would be living within the spoils of one of the most absurd social crisis of the Human history, brought to us by fear and ignorance. Prejudice and discrimination have long been around the table as our guests, unfortunately. This paradigm was never taken to a high level of absurdity where those guests would possess such power, but if we take into consideration the more recent events such has the suspension of the European Human Rights Convention by the Turkish government, one starts to believe that maybe that same power is bigger that we were dreaming of or at least we wanted to believe, since we live in a global society connected technologically. 

Rurality, as a counterpoint to that idea, of a global society, was a hot topic back then. It has been for so long. The lack of opportunities for young people in rural areas all over Europe (not to say the world) need to be tackled addressed and somehow prioritised. The youngsters are somewhat the future; at least we like to believe so. Society decided to centralise everything in the big metropolitan centres, obliging just like this people to migrate. Small towns became ghostly and small villages started to disappear with time. The few who can’t a ord to move start to develop a deep hatred towards their surroundings instead of trying to take advantages of the richness of it.” - Miguel Stichini 

"Arts humanize us – by creating or interaction with artworks, we feel and think things that would not otherwise come to our attention. We believe that art has the potential for transformation and change: it elicits that most sophisticated and necessary of human emotions: empathy. Arts, culture and cultural heritage therefore have a huge potential to inspire people’s personal and social development in many ways. Creative activities are a powerful tool that can help participants discover their inner potential and increase their level of self-awareness.” - Anne Merlin 

The place and the people

"Who would think that a group of twenty artists, pedagogues and theorists would go to Bernay-en-Ponthieu and exile themselves from twenty days? One cannot really consi- der this movement as exile, since we had quite good conditions, though one needs to acknowledge that we try to put ourselves in the local youngsters shoes, and after a while went nuts. We were able to distance ourselves and take advantage of the surroundings merely because we knew we wouldn’t stay there forever.” - Miguel Stichini The artists

Aleksandra Miciak, Henry Linnard, Karolina Ufa, Lilit Stepanyan, Sona Parsyan, Anne Merlin (find out more), Carolina Gomes-TeixeiraHenri OtsingKatarzyna Lukasiewicz (find out more), Katrin Kullo, Laura Gonçalo, Luis Vieira, Melanie Garland (find out more), Miguel Stichini, Monica Talina, Monika Proba, Pedro Sousa Loureiro (find out more), Ricardo Soares, Sigrid Salutee, Tiago Mascarenhas.

The method

"The aforementioned circle were realised during the MoveMovie’s residency. First two days of training were devoted to create a bound between participants and let them know their skills, possibilities and limits. After initial fascination, the con ictual situation between team members' started appearing. They were caused by di erent ideas, working styles and expectations. Gradually, the team moves into the norming stage. This is when people start to resolve their di erences and appreciate colleagues' strengths. During the last week, it was observed that the team reaches the performing stage. The hard work leaded, without friction, to the achievement of the team's goal.” - Karolina Ufa 

The booklet

This little book is accompanying the movies created by international young artists during our film residency "I move, you move, everybody move for movies", this booklet documents the working process and the experience of each movie team: their inspirations, references, experiments and progresses towards the production of a movie. 

Read or download it here.

The creations

Finally, why not just see the creations and enjoy them?

More than 100 horses

Inner Space

The Lullaby

Time is a Gambit

Reflection of a Generation or Silver Spoon Loneliness

Choir

Politico Manus

_

Created by Nomadways

Move Movie has been co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union.

Visit project’s page on Nomadways website.

See all photos from Move Movie.

[nomadwayseu-blog]

#MoveMovie: “Time is a Gambit”

TRIPTYCH, by Luís Vieira

Transparência, Girl and Fake it ‘Til you Make it take part in a triptych of actions intrinsically related with each other. These actions work together as a representation of macro and microstructures that overlook the act of contemplating, the feeling of imminence and the social and political dynamics of today’s world.

The influence of the surrounding rurality and the quiet solitude of the village of Bernay-au-Ponthieu acts as a hermetic space, and thus as a strong element of contrast with the wide and complex themes approached.

The need to talk about these issues is a consequence of the fast and growing transformation ongoing in our society; as Europeans: the concept of European Union; and as Artists: how these events affect our ideas, how important is to find the time and space to put ourselves in the right place, the best place to formulate an opinion and call to action.  

Contemplation is most certainly associated with the passing of time in Nature and rural areas. Here we overtake that significance as the notion of Time, or lack of it - when product-driven mentality asphyxiate the creative mind -  to represent the frustration of each individual and one’s attempt to remain tuned with the artistic process itself.

Throughout the artistic residency, we were witnesses of several news that echoed the common feeling of imminence – the imminence of a social change, greater than our perception or our control – an atmosphere that just like storm or rain, we can predict but with no knowledge of time or location. This eminence is present but never talked about, is somehow “in the air”, printed in the hard and raw pictures conceived in the three canvas of the “Time Is A Gambit”.

Created by:

Luís Vieira Miguel Stichini Mónica Talina Ricardo Soares Tiago Mascarenhas

Read about Move Movie here.