Nomdaographies

Around 93, Land, 2008

In 2007, we set out upon a group of pilgrimages, traveling in whatever apparatus we contrived, alone or together. My need was to feel land again, and to prepare for longer journeys in our not so far off future. I think of the subways underneath New York and how they exemplify a disconnection between the place and my context, and how riding my bicycle through the streets I have no choice but to feel everything around me: I smell the traffic, the garbage, hear the honking, I avoid people walking into the roads on their mobile phones, and realize the space between here and there in an absolute, sensorial way, taken for granted otherwise.

The mobile shelter that I composed for this journey is one that I see in multiples around me every day. These structures are some of the best works of art I have seen: they excite me in their prophetic, intricate, accumulative, tragicomic way. They are emblematic of the human food chain, the cycles of capitalism and waste, and the precariousness of life, our need for sustenance, and the value of the forgotten, usual things that our societies produce and discard. These sculptures are as natural as biology: some peoples’ refuse heaped into carts inside of bags, tied with bungee cords, stacked with furniture, locked, protected with umbrellas. These structures close a consumer-loop, they are made entirely of items found in the streets, and I imagine these city street landscapes that carts travel on now will be the suburban strip mall in the future. Will we at one point be searching these emptied storefronts in search of some useful furnishings, for something in such abundance today that we hardly realize its value?

The boxes on Kart are either blank, layered, or from a variety of present locations. Many of the boxes are the ones that I have used to move from place to place, or to store things I have collected and saved. They are left alone as remnants or re-branded with symbols to form a cohesive meld of discarded and reused present everywheres with future pervasive brands: Bechtel, Suez, Lockheed Martin, GE, Exxon (all essentials and commodity-driven companies) represented through their signs as powerful forces. If this is supposed to be a sampling of boxes that describe this world, the excess of these oligopolistic company labels explains their lock on commodities. This structure attempts to articulate nomadic ideas of a shelter/home that can be packed away and set up. Kart is covered in braided rope and symbolic language, threaded around and into each other, holding the bundles together and telling a story about the throes of technology, the assumed and shifting identities of cultures and individuals, global economic and cultural tensions, survival and mobility. Kart is a mobile livelihood. It is a metaphor for expansion, and at the same time a personal, Sysiphusian reality of struggle through change. Through the myth and reality of cargo cults (brought on by war machines) and through symbols that are the only remnants of language as we know it today, Kart describes colonialism in its future form.

We are all drivers, bums, myths, nomads, and noones.