Stop-Motion Migration is a series of almost- maps and almost-tours. It performs a different kind of psychogeography, one that doesn’t actualise an experience of mobility through walking, but offers a mobile experience that is apprehended from a static position. If, as sociologist Vincent Kaufmann claims,‘psychogeography is fundamentally an experience of mobility, applied to space as much as to time’ 2 , then a projected tour of space and through time is possible. Stop-Motion Migration produces a peripatetic experience that more closely approximates artist Richard Long’s description of a walk as living in the imagination of anyone, 3 which is another space too. Stop-Motion Migration finds and maps gallery movements as a way to locate ghosts or trace absences in the city. This project focuses on the idea of ghosting, or the accumulation of absences in specific places, rather than a walking tour of the city. It reveals in an abstract way where and when certain galleries appeared, migrated or disappeared, using the ads and listings in Canadian Art magazine as a barometer for this. Its primary intention is not to enter a discussion on the effects of gentrification so commonly (and importantly) associated with the migration of cultural sites, but rather to focus on movement and motion, an ever-changing constellation of appearances or presences in the city.
Stop-Motion Migration No.1 (1985), 2010. 22 x 17” digital print on paper
stop-motion migration
To intervene on a territory is not merely an act of planning but an act of creation, an attempt to assemble contradictions and transform them into poetic relationships: ultimately one is more attentive to modifying how space is perceived than the way space itself exists. — Stalker, Manifesto 1
urbanism | projects for the city by deborah wang
1 Stalker, Manifesto . 5 March 2010 <http:// digilander.libero.it/stalkerlab/tarkowsky/manifesto/ manifesting.htm> 2 Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry , trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. p111 3 in R.H. Fuchs. Richard Long. London:Thames and Hudson and New York:The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1986. p 236
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Stop-Motion Migration No.2 (1990), 2010. 22 x 17” digital print on paper
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