Concludes our 20th anniversary and an exploration, initiated last fall, of the notion of “transit.” This journey has led us through different discursive spaces that signal the atmosphere of change, turbulence and fluctuation of the present times. Our concluding issue examines particular types of nomadism through the work of Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn, Argentine’s Guillermo Kuitca and Gilles Mihalcean from Quebec. Quebecois filmmaker and art critic Olivier Asselin recounts his experience of the Parisian intellectual life. Marie-Ange Brayer discusses cartography through various contemporary artworks where nomadism and territory are privileged subjects. Thierry Kuntzel, in a project conceived for this issue, reflects on a trip to Tampico, caught in the movement between the imaginary and the real.
The last four issues will have in this manner described multiple sojourns, decisive personal experiences, excursions into uncharted lands or sites in transition (Russia, Slovenia, South Africa, South America, First Nations territory), excursions undertaken with a new attitude, an eye for the unusual, for what is normally disregarded; unseemly ways of addressing language, gender, traveling, the organic and the inorganic, the practice of contemporary art itself, its institutions, museums, exhibitions; phenomena of culture(s), acculturation, world market, colonialism.
In the current debate against contemporary art what is basically left out is transit particularly as expressed in this year’s four issues. Yet it is essential to contemporary art, regardless of the period. Aside from the notion of the avant-garde and its idealist connotations, motion is what contemporary art is all about – going off the beaten track to try and rediscover the world, to find ways of pushing it ahead. Art reveals that motion, however shaky. Each motion is a step in itself, hopefully clearing a passage.
How can one make sense of things in motion, except in understanding that only motion makes sense.
