Wanderlust: Mobility, Mapping and Being in the World
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Wanderlust: mobility, mapping and being in the world. A project submitted in fulfilment of the requirements Susanna Castleden for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy BA (Hons) Fine Art, MA Visual Art School of Art, College of Design and Social Context RMIT University, Melbourne August 2013 Wanderlust: mobility, mapping and being in the world. A project submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Susanna Castleden BA (Hons) Fine Art, MA Visual Art School of Art, College of Design and Social Context RMIT University, Melbourne August 2013 Wanderlust: mobility, mapping and being in the world. Susanna Castleden W b°00’00” Wanderlust: mobility, mapping and being in the world. Declaration. I certify that, except where due acknowledgement has been made, the work is that of the author alone; the work has not been submitted previously, in whole or in part, to qualify for any other academic award; the content of the thesis is the result of work which has been carried out since the official commencement date of the approved research program; and any editorial work, paid or unpaid, carried out by a third party is acknowledged; and, ethics procedures and guidelines have been followed. Susanna Castleden Signature______________________________________ Date__________________________________________ Wanderlust: mobility, mapping and being in the world. Susanna Castleden W I°00’00” Wanderlust: mobility, mapping and being in the world. Summary. Identifying with the field of cultural geography this project questions how the consequence and affect of global mobility has changed the way we see and encounter the world, and how this has necessitated alternative ways of visualising our position within it. Drawing from the research of mobilities scholars John Urry and Tim Cresswell, this creative project explores mobility associated specifically with leisure travel, examining the phenomenon of mobility and what it means to be part of a world ‘on the move’. The way in which we move through time and space and our relationship to other mobilities prompts the question of how this experience might be understood and transformed into a visual practice, and encourages new strategies and methodologies for visualising mobility. Mobility research provides a critical analysis of doing things – travelling, walking, cycling, or flying – in a similar way that creative practice research enables reflection on the doing of making. Mobilities research offers critical analysis beyond the simple fact that movement is a by-product of transport, instead it turns attention to the embodied experiences of mobility, to ask what happens whilst we are on the move, and how does the experience of mobility affect our understandings of time and space? Thus the embodied experience of doing is understood through both creative practice and theoretical reflection. The relationship between art and cartography has a long and rich history. From the earliest maps of the Roman Empire to the work of contemporary artists such as Julie Mehretu and Guillermo Kuitca, artists and cartographers continue to utilise geographic and creative methodologies to visualise the world. In addition to scrutinising the visual language of traditional mapping, this research project turns to contemporary cartographic practices as a way to find out how the world may be encountered, how it can be represented visually, and how it may be experienced ontologically. The multitude of ways in which we experience the world via our imaginary or real presence in it continues to offer a rich area of multidisciplinary research for artists and geographers alike. At a time when every surface of the world has been discovered, surveyed or mapped in some way, and the globe is encased in the tracks of satellites, global travel and movement, artists are looking at ways of making use of this information: of the spaces, journeys and experiences that this era presents. Wanderlust: mobility, mapping and being in the world. Susanna Castleden W III°00’00” Martin Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the world forms a key part of this project and is drawn from as a way of introducing, and in many ways contrasting, the notion that in order to live an authentic existence, human experience must be rooted to places or regions. Within mobilities research there is a call to examine the mobile and nomadic in favour of the sedentary; to understand ways of knowing via the mobile bodies that make up our contemporary world. Therefore in choosing to examine being-in-the-world through mobility, the possibility is presented that moving through the physical world may open up new understandings of being. The relationship between knowing and being are central in this research project, as a corollary to both mobility and mapping. Throughout this project maps and mapping offer an enduring structural and conceptual methodology to create works that evoke some of the unknown in a world of the known. Examined through Nicolas Bourriaud’s aptly geographical metaphor of a conceptual archipelago (Bourriaud, 2009) this research project unites a series of separate yet interrelated ideas akin to metaphorical islands, and draws them together to form an archipelago of creative projects. Arising from a curiosity about how the world is encountered and represented, this research project connects cultural geography and cartographic thinking with contemporary art theory and practice, in order to seek new ways of understanding the world. The objective of this project is to create a body of two and three-dimensional artworks utilising methodologies associated with drawing and printmaking, to allude to contemporary understandings of wanderlust, mobility, mapping and being-in-the-world. Through this research project I suggest that being in our contemporary world is inextricably linked to wanderlust, mobility and mapping. Summary Acknowledgements. Acknowledgements. I would like to acknowledge Curtin University for the support provided to me in order to complete this project, and the staff in the School of Design and Art, particularly Lee Ingram, Dr Ann Schilo and Dr Julian Goddard for their generous advice and guidance. I gratefully thank and acknowledge my supervisors at RMIT for overseeing this project: my senior supervisor Professor Lesley Duxbury for providing gentle and enduring support and encouragement, and also Professor William Cartwright for additional comments and feedback. I would like to gratefully acknowledge the attentive copyediting assistance of Nyanda Smith and also thank Dr Sean Gorman for his observations and advice on earlier drafts of the exegesis. I would like to acknowledge and extend my thanks and gratitude to my colleagues and fellow PhD students Bruce Slatter and Nicole Slatter for their endless generosity, intellectual rigor, enduring friendship, and for the gift of The Radicant. To my brothers Nick, Sam and Josh for their informal input into this project through their shared knowledge of the world – from below, on and above its surface – and most importantly to our parents Bill and Wendy, who instilled in us the love of maps, family, travel and a curiosity about the world. Finally and most of all I would like to thank the most precious travellers who came on this journey with me: Bevan, Mia and Stella. Wanderlust: mobility, mapping and being in the world. Susanna Castleden W V°00’00” Wanderlust: mobility, mapping and being in the world. Contents. Introduction // Wanderlust: mobility, mapping and being in the world. ..............001 Chapter One: Wanderlust and Islands in the Stucco. ........................................011 Chapter Two: Mobility and global circumnavigations. ........................................025 Chapter Three: Mapping and building the world. ..............................................053 Chapter Four: Being-in-the-world. ....................................................................083 Chapter Five: Archipelago. ...............................................................................109 Conclusion. ......................................................................................................126 References. ......................................................................................................129 Table of Images................................................................................................143 Appendix. .........................................................................................................153 Wanderlust: mobility, mapping and being in the world. Susanna Castleden W VII°00’00” Introduction // Wanderlust: mobility, mapping and being in the world. In his preface to The Radicant, Nicolas Bourriaud uses the term conceptual archipelago to articulate his approach to exploring an idea with fragments or smaller parts that are firmly linked together by a central idea (Bourriaud, 2009). Bourriaud’s conceptual archipelago evokes for me an image of a cluster of small islands, or thoughts, surrounded by a body of water through which one can occasionally see, or at least sense, an underlying structure that ultimately links them together. I use this phrase by way of an introduction as it encompasses and evokes the key issues that I draw on in this research project, and present in this exegesis: fragments of geographical thinking, wonder, travel, imagination, mobility and mapping. This research project begins with two of the larger islands of the archipelago – geography and creative practice. Arguably beginning with Strabo’s encyclopaedia