A Shifting Room with Different Notions on Translocal, Transnational, and Hybrid Spatial Structures: A Reflection on our Workshop in November 2024
From conversations and exchanges between the organizers and CRC-based scholars, we decided to engage with the art/science bridge on translocal home-makings in a quickly re-figuring world. Thus, we designed a processual multimedia workshop to encounter, reflect upon, and upend questions on translocality, of transnationalism, and of hybrid cultural and space-oriented structures. Working actively with the workshop room using time-based, graphic, and performative languages, we aimed to ground broad, abstract concepts in graspable experiences. We first got into the atmosphere of thinking visually by watching and discussing Camilo Bravo Molano’s audio-visual work “Liquid Homes”: a film portrait mapping a displaced person’s experience in Portugal. The participants were then invited to share ideas and explore possibilities to translate and elaborate on the broad concepts of translocality, transnationalism, and hybrid spatialities. We used graphic prompts, language, and performative explorations to enhance this embodied analysis that we developed both individually, then collectively. The workshop closed with a lecture by Prof. Dr. Magdalena Nowicka through a self-reflection on spatialities of migrants and transnational affect. She put in words aspects and differences of transnational and translocal homes introduced to us through Bravo Molano’s film images in the beginning of the workshop.
In what follows, we guide you through the movement of participants and objects through the room, shifting during the different moments of the workshop in relationship with the movement—expansion/retreat—of ideas evoked, provoked, and emulsified through those moments. The intention is to unpack the “big” translocal and transnational concepts by retracing interactions and activities. These being the interaction between the physical bodies present in the space—tables, chairs, paper, pens, drawings, human participants, cardboard walls—and the activities that kept us in continuous motion, as workshop organizers, participants, and the more-than-human companions of the workshop. We write as “we” when referring to the workshop participants and coordinators as one whole participant human group, and otherwise make a distinction to specify the subject group.
Film Screening “Liquid Homes”
The participants sat as audience for the screening, on relatively comfortable chairs all facing the same direction: the screening wall. The screening wall returned to us moving images, sounds, and voice narration of an individual story of translocal homemaking, home-‘doing,’ and dwelling within multiple and geographically distant homes. The story itself was read/watched/heard by us workshop organizers as one of identity development through feeling (and building) belonging to places, times, and people. The film also involved the development of practices, imaginaries, and dispositifs (devices, systems in the sense of Foucault) that enhance and engender processes of identity construction in relation to belonging. In conversation with the director—via videocall, occupying the projection space of the wall—the workshop participants stirred the conversation after the screening towards the idea of liquidity in of itself and home as an aspirational imaginary. Movement then holds two perspectives of the story (those of the organizers and participants) together. Meaning, on the one hand, we see the moving image (film) as a mapping method that retraces a migration story, migration being a literal embodiment of physical movement. On the other hand, we found liquidity captures the sense of personal transformation, in other words, a story and more abstract embodiment of mental movement.
We saw in the film clouds drifting over the tops of the houses at an intersection in the small Portuguese town of Cercal. Played at increasing speed in the film, the clouds embody an evaporating liquid whose existence is in perpetual motion. Change and movement—in contrast with stable elements—are also inherent in the workshop’s setup. Choreographed in time frames, meeting points, separations, and sudden shifts, the changing room, object arrangements and interactions between workshop participants alternated between increasingly expansive and introverted phases.
Step by step participants came into action. After the rather passive and anonymous audience position in the film presentation, the participants were invited to bring their objects, pencils, notebooks, cups, and water bottles to a big rectangular island of tables, not yet aware that five minutes later they would have to give up their newly created comfort in the workshop room just to step into a next challenge.
Two Separate Sides and Individual Duos: One to One Introduction Round
The tables’ arrangement split the participants into two groups sitting along the two long sides of the island. In this spatial arrangement balancing distance and vicinity, participants were asked to explain and reflect on the concepts, ideas, and questions they related to translocal and transnational differentiations. Creating bubbles of pair discussions, participants introduced themselves to their direct neighbor. Not only a verbal introduction, but also with notes and work samples they had been asked to bring along for the workshop. After this introduction round, the tables’ rectangle shrunk to a line, the two distinct sides brought closer together. Participants were now facing each other across the tables’ line, as seen in figure 5.
Facing Pairs and Changing Dialogue Partners: A Drawing-Exchange in Transition
The participants were sitting along tables, in a line, in the room. In the middle of the tables, a line of drawings was laid out: to stimulate sensorial reflections including division, connection, detachment, leaving behind, and new beginnings. The lines drawn on paper represented a visual simplification of complex relationships of translocality, transnationality or hybridity. They could be associated with borders, border crossings, border dissolutions, and separation. The drawing paper and pens handed out to each participant invited personal pictorial reproductions, transformations, or further developments of the graphic proposals. Participants in pairs exchanged about the graphics lying between them in one moment, only to be urged to abandon the conversation at the next, leaving their exchanges behind, and proceeding to the following dialogue partner. Engaging in couple-of-minutes increments almost overwhelmed us with a threefold intensity: the sound of all engaged voices, the flow of ideas, and the frantic timing of conversation changes.
The series of drawings laid out on the tables to initiate and orient participants’ conversations were inspired by the artist Chiara Carrer’s book Pensar el espacio. Reflejos, superficies, y colores (transl. “Thinking the Space. Reflections, surfaces, and colors”). Some drawings are a direct re-interpretation of Chiara Carrer, while others were developed from the drawing research of Simone Rueß and her conversations on spatial imaginations with more than 30 interviewees from all over the world.
The artistic research exchange with deepani seth was also an important reference for the development of both figurative and sequential design of this drawing and exchange interaction. In her drawings and cut-outs, deepani seth explores her “experience as an internal migrant in India […] and a transnational migrant in lutruwita/Tasmania.” Her series of slightly changing drawings try to sequentially grasp the inclusions and exclusions that form(ed) her home. The artist also works on transforming her graphical research into three dimensional experiential sculptures of paper cut-outs. The cutting of paper was the medium to leave traces of (forced) actions in brief time frames in the following moment of the workshop.
A Room with Borders, Barriers, and Open Forms: An Embodied Non-verbal Interaction
Next the group interaction transformed from intense verbal action to non-verbal communication, as the engagement with two-dimensional graphics was followed by a challenge in three-dimensional space. Instead of sitting and talking, the task spurred our movement across space.
The participants chose their own colored paper sheet, a package of three letters out of three possible packages, and then positioned themselves somewhere in the room. They were asked to read the three letters in sequence, where each letter prescribed an action or suggested a reaction. The letters’ prescriptions and suggestions implicitly evoked (forced) migration stories. For instance, prescribing sudden flight from the person’s current position in the room, and to carry along only as little (a paper cut-out) as possible because “there is no time to gather one’s belongings.” The letters’ instructions thus transferred abstract concepts and concerns to the present room, filled with present people, tables, and cardboard walls constructing physical barriers and shaping the space. Along with their bodies’ movement, participants had the colored paper: some parts left behind, others cut off and brought along. As opposed to the drawn lines on paper we had previously thought about and spoke on, we were now cutting paper into strips, shapes, forms. The focus shifted from figurations drawn on paper to figurative cut-outs. In turn, these were put into relation with the others’ paper cut-outs and their positions in space.
Participants were confronted with the challenge of having to leave their present position in the room to reach another point in the space, limited by the four structural walls but also some additional cardboard walls. Acting in their own space, participants initially imperceptibly created a common structure of changing distances in the room. Forms and shapes of paper left behind, foreign lines, and cut-outs found at the next position, they gradually triggered more conscious interactions with spatial traces of the others. One sequential letter after the other, local and migrated shapes formed fragile hybrid common figurations.
It is worth mentioning that one of the many strings that pulled this experience together was that we, Francesca Ceola and Simone Rueß, have both studied invisible lines of movements in public spaces, analyzing them through performative actions and interventions, and visualizing the recorded use of public space through artistic methods. With this sense of movement as a drawing in space, we collaboratively developed this group task with reference to de Certeau’s observations of daily movement and Simone Rueß’ own experiences on the (inter)subjective space at the Gzrzegorz Kowalski studio for audiovisual space in 2008/09. Grzegorz Kowalski, famous for his group workshop OWOW (Obszar Wspólny/Obszar Własny- Common Space/Individual Space)—based on non-verbal communication—challenges participants with “the borderline between the individual and the group” and the “communication […] through ([their) own physicality.” (Sienkiewicz 2015: 48)
Yet, the challenge acquired an extra layer during our workshop when we asked participants to re-trace and narrate through writing on paper the happening that had just unfolded in the room by centering their own experience. The point of the exercise goes beyond a probably futile attempt at separating the intuitive and conscious spatial and material decisions they took in following the letters’ prescriptions and suggestions. It was rather an opportunity to verbalize the decision-making process and movement within, thus visualizing them, and making them approachable in collective discussion.
Islands of Creation and Synthesis: Individual and Collective Reflections in a Shared Space
After two phases of expansive exploration, we turned the attention inwards while the space scattered as if each one was an archipelago island, connected yet distant. Participants could each take position anywhere with intact paper, pen, the accumulated pile of drawn and written paper from the previous actions, rearticulating the spatial organization of the room, and the objects and subjects inside it, in yet a new figuration.
This time the moment was intended for reflection: to bring together ideas and experiences triggered during the previous phases of conversation, hectic movement, and embodied reflection, with the expectations and pre-rehearsed sets of knowledge participants had brought along for the workshop. The invitation was for every participant to assemble hybrid constructs from their personal work—transcending the specific workshop context—with the materials (dossiers of paper, tentative drawings, drafty text), knowledge, and enhanced sensitivity produced and acquired throughout the workshop. The assemblages interweaved with the pre-workshop material with the new realizations from the workshop about personal projects, seeding hybridity of ideas for participants to “take home,” but also widening the concepts the workshop wished to explore. They also materially constitute simultaneity for the sequence of moments the workshop context created, juxtaposing the multiple time layers we had experienced for the past few hours. Assemblages bearing reference to what was, what is, and what will be. This materialized a parallel to what we had also planned, a workshop that is a sequence of actions, a series of changes of spatial figurations.
Common Space of Listening: Keynote-Lecture by Magdalena Nowicka
During the performative tasks, each of us had memories returned to us through personal stories. The account by Magdalena Nowicka felt like a smooth journey, drifting along her own account of migration during the evening keynote. With an insight into her bookshelves and cabinets, a vase from her relatives, pictures from her homeland on her apartment’s walls, well and lesser-known book titles, Nowicka questioned her transnationality through objects and emotions. Relating transnationality and translocality to self-identification, reciprocal projections of knowledge and value systems, and the (un)successful recognition of the other’s perspective, codes, and knowledge, time and change garnered augmented prominence. We migrants are not only mis-recognized perhaps among the fellows with whom we share our present places, we are also not the same subjects that left an initial home, as time and experience remake us into continuously new beings.
CONCLUSION
The rapid, time-framed and place-constrained interactions explored during the workshop can be observed and were intentionally initiated as cues for refiguration of spatial, social, psychological, and cognitive (as in how associations of ideas are enhanced) arrangements and constellations that tell us something around concepts of translocality, transnationality, and hybrid cultural space-oriented structures. The setup of a laboratory with sequential tasks and reflection allowed us to grasp the nature of these spatial structures both in an abstract and elementary way. Film, verbal exchange, figurative language, movement, drawing, symbols, performance, objects, language, and lecture. In diverse media and transdisciplinary reflections, we looked at these formats and terms from various sides, as if we deconstructed their characters into multifaceted multiple layers. Thinking towards expanding the edges of the refiguration theory vis-à-vis territorial structures, we engaged with the diffracted meanings of translocalization with a postnationalist critique to explore practices, memories, and meaning-making at multiple levels: socio-material, ecological-economic, and symbolic-transcendent. As a result, the drift of notions, shifts, and hybridization were not just a conceptual exercise but also a figurative and embodied one.
Author Biography
Francesca Ceola (PhD Research Fellow, C08: Architectures of Asylum II, Geography) in her recent research in Lagos examines home-making structures on unstable landscapes. By emphasizing the construction elements of homes and the socio-ecologies that support livelihoods, she discusses questions of making home for forcibly displaced individuals and communities, in shifting environments under the “urban development agenda” conditions, and the political economies/ecologies that embed them. Francesca Ceola studied Sustainable Development at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland, UK), and completed her master’s in Human Geography at the Instituto de Geografia e Ordenamento do Território Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal).
Simone Rueß (Visual Artist and Associate Member at CRC 1265 ‘Re-Figuration of Spaces’, TU Berlin) in her artistic research records how space is created and perceived through movement, narratives and memories. In her long-term project INhabit, Simone Rueß traces visually how mental images of home are influenced by global crises, geopolitical caesura, displacement, or migration. Currently she collaborates together with Qusay Amer, Maureen Abi-Ghanem, and Layla Dadouch in the project “Hybrid INhabit: home–Home–HOME,” as part of the C08, Architectures of Asylum II (CRC 1265 „Re-Figuration of Spaces“, TU, Berlin). Simone Rueß was a fellow on behalf of Kunstfonds Bonn (2023/2012), at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (2016/17), and at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2013). Since 2018 she has been teaching in the field of art and design at various universities. www.urbik.org
Workshop participants:
Qusay Amer (Architecture, CRC1265, TU Berlin), Saba Barani (Architecture, TU Berlin), Minou Bouchehri (Sociology, DeZIM, Berlin), Sarah Friedel (Urban Planning, CRC1265, TU Berlin), Eva Korte (Sociology, CRC1265, TU Berlin), Jae-Young Lee (Architecture, CRC1265, IRS Erkner), Dr. María Linares (Visual Arts and Research, Berlin), Olga Łojewska (Sociology, DeZIM, Berlin), Dr. Magdalena Nowicka (Sociology, DeZIM, Berlin), Ludovica Tomarchio (Architecture, CRC1265, UdK Berlin), Dr. Karolina Wlazło-Malinowska (Art Curating and Research, Berlin), Mingyue Li (FU Berlin)
References and additional material:
Kowalski, G. (2015). Kowalnia 1985-2015. Katowice: Akademia Sztuk Pięknych.
Carrer, C. (2018). Pensar el Espacio. Reflejos, Superficies y Colores. Tradución de Ernesto Lumbredas. Mexico: Petra Ediciones.
Nowicka, M. (2023). Chapter 42: Unveiling the (trans)national in the home space: an auto-ethnography. In Handbook on Home and Migration (p.515-528). Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800882775.00055
Video essay by Giraldo Villamizar, C., Ceola, F., González Arango, N., Brito-Henriques, E. (YEAR MISSING). The potential of artistic action/intervention and video making as methods for scientific research in geography – study case in the city of Lisbon. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZmaI5eIjuQJIXOC3z4kZKspekv72xqzg/view
Herrmann, C. (2016). Invisible Movement Spaces with Simone Rueß. Biographies & Space, Issue N° 4. https://schloss-post.com/invisible-movement-spaces/
Rueß, S. (2023). Drawing and (re)acting: The creation of Movement Spaces. Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice, 8, 81–94. https://doi.org/10.1386/drtp_00107_1
Malinowski, J. (2012). Movement in the Body of the City. On the Work of Simone Rueß. In Movement Space, Simone Rueß. Warsaw: Fundacja 93 and Galeria le Guern (p. 7-20). https://urbik.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/2012_MOVEMENTSPACE_Simone-Ruess.pdf