Songliner - AudioVisual Expedition
Photography, writing

The expedition was conducted with two other artists: Russian artist Elèna Nemkova and Austrian artist Joerg Piringer. It is inspired by the Aborigine tradition of the ‘songline’, where a chant or song describes the country and the people who live there. The songline functions as a map and ideally the Aborigines find their way around the country by singing the descriptive chants as they walk. I wanted to use today's technologies to compose a contemporary songline.
The Songliner is a van that travelled between two arbitrary points on a random path. In a month of work on the road we explored and ‘composed’ the songline that connects today’s apparently fragmentary and non-linear societies. Instead of modern navigation systems, we relied on directions from passers-by, stories by townsfolk, and our reactions to different land and cityscapes. During the expedition Nemkova and Piringer collected sound and visual material respectively which was processed into a video. I took pictures of Europe’s cultural homogeny, simply because that is what I was seeing, and bound them together in a chronological collage. I also wrote travel logs from the back seat of the car as it followed an invisible line through cities and country.

Locations: Galerie Outline (Amsterdam), Kultur Fabrik (Luxemburg), Espace En Cours (Paris) / Sponsored by Pépinières Européennes pour Jeunes Artistes