~a journey from one point to another~

With these words Dante began his own traveller's tale, a descent into hell. Such epic journeys are written into our cultural imaginary many times over. They appear not only as literal renderings, but also as allegory, finding their expression in myth, art, history, geography, science. Even so, in Dante's journey, it is not that he has begun his journey from a dark wood, nor that we know his destination to be the raging inferno of the underworld, but rather it is the 'savage path' which is its substance.

 It might be that Peregrination does not evoke awareness of either beginning or end, but merely one of travelling and transitoriness. As I study the title of this exhibition I am drawn increasingly to the space of those dots, between one point and another. They are inbetween and ambiguous. They fascinate me. They are neither here nor there. They represent a trajectory, a line of flight through whose incompleteness and partiality, possibility thrives. It is like Kristeva's evocation of the abject as "a time of oblivion and thunder and the moment when revelation bursts forth".2 Perhaps the exercise undertaken by these artists is reminiscent of Braidotti's figuration of the nomadic subject. While the 'nomad' is a feminist figuration, it represents "a situated, postmodern, culturally differentiated understanding of the subject in general and of the feminist subject in particular".3

 Braidotti further argues that subjectivity founded on corporeality is integral to the project of nomadism. Notions of spatiality are both implicit in and produced by notions of the body. Travelling is relational, not only to one's body, but how one's body acts, accessing/deploying space and knowledge. For Braidotti, the nomadism in question here refers to the kind of critical consciousness that resists settling into socially coded modes of thought and behaviour. Not all nomads are world travellers; some of the greatest trips can take place without physically moving from one's habit. It is the subversion of set conventions that defines the nomadic state, not the literal act of travelling.4

The nomad's identity is "a map of where s/he has already been; s/he can always reconstruct it a posteriori, as a set of steps in an itinerary ... the nomad's identity is an inventory of traces."5

 This exhibition is a series of maps, revealing the complexities of alterity, transition and perception which confront any traveller, especially the migrant and/or the post-colonial subject. Those traces are magnified and exposed. This is a mode of remembrance and (re)collection. As subjects, none of us are likely to forget ourselves. Carter elaborates the dilemma:
An authentically migrant perspective would, perhaps, be based on an intuition that the opposition between here and there is itself a cultural construction, a consequence of thinking in terms of fixed entities and defining them oppositionally. It might begin by regarding movement, not as an awkward interval between fixed points of departure and arrival, but as a mode of being in the world. The question would be, then, not how to arrive, but how to move, how to identify convergent and divergent moments; and the challenge would be how to notate such events, how to give them a historical and social value.6

 Peregrination begins a process of notation through its representations of the movements which these world weary travellers have endured. It is an idea/experience of travel from one point to another that is the defining link in this exhibition. Be aware that these journeys have been diverse and disparate, a further indication that notions like the migrant experience are contrived and generalised totalisations of essentialised foreignness.

Once the domain of explorers and adventurers spreading the disease of colonialism, travelling is no longer the rarefied experience that it has been. Typically, epic journeys have been associated with the exploits of men: women's journeys have been largely ignored. In Dante's Divine Comedy, Beatrice is the object of a quest ? symbolic religiosity ? rather than an adventurer in her own right. By example, Thelma and Louise as a road movie has disrupted the genre as a haven for masculine endeavour and male bonding. It was criticised for doing so, despite the cartharsis it offered to so many women filmgoers. Increasingly, flagrantly and defiantly, women are tracing and writing their own experiences into new maps of the world.

 That recent phenomenon of mass migration, typified by postwar diaspora, has again rewritten the world as an endless series of transits. The same technology which makes colonialism and migration possible, also makes tourism possible. But tourism bears many negative associations and not many of us readily admit to it as our practice. Hodge points out that the 'tour' isn't movement from one point to another. It is " a journey that returns to origins, either away from origins and back again, or a journey to origins and back".7 It represents something of a pilgrimage to sites of voyeuristic interest, or a turbulent amusement park joyride which provides the requisite thrills.

 Such terminology could never encapsulate the experience of those who have fled bloodshed and persecution in their homelands. For them, travel is not folly, it is flight and exile. Nevertheless, it may still represent a defining moment in one's life, emerging as a technology of the self, how one knows oneself or cares for oneself.8 Road movies, while generally about the experiences of men, are never just about crunching gravel under the worn tyres of old cars. Such travelling extends one's experience and tests one's boundaries, representing the space for self-reflection, transformation and most significantly, confronting one's demons. Subsequently, those protagonists are irrevocably changed.

 Travelling, then, can't be passive or purposeless, even if there is no predetermined destination. It transforms one's way of being, one's relationship to place and one's relationship to the world. No one can really be just one of life's passengers, although I suspect a great many of us may be (or become) vicarious and/or virtual travellers. It's a luxury afforded us by an increasingly technologised society equipped to diminish the tyranny of distance. We live in terrain where information travels faster than our bodies. Like travel itself, the flows of communication have compressed our experience of time and space (deterritorialised), reordered the world (reterritorialised) and rendered each encounter a 'shrinking world experience' which homogenises the space of the globe.

Virilio poses the question, "when we can go to the antipodes and back in an instant, what will become of us?"9 As the distinction between travel and communication continues to collapse, we might begin to wonder where all the space has gone. We might hope that the interstice between one point and another never closes entirely and that we may be continually enabled to recoup that space as one for chaotic articulations and demonstrations of alterity, partiality, movement and pleasure.