paris. (an introduction)
memos on difference.
1.
in thinking about my trip to Paris, there was a certain trepidation from the moment i got my residency acceptance letter to landing at Charles de Gaulle. a fear of the retraction of a promise and all the things that might possibly go wrong as i prepared for and embarked on my first trip to Europe. i worried about the documents or procedures i might have forgotten or overlooked, from my visa appointment to interactions with immigration officials at the various borders i passed through. arriving in Paris, i had hoped this fear would pass but i spent my first days in the city walking around with my passport in my pocket, a way of legitimising or defending my presence to imagined confrontation. i was invited here and held certain rights to be here. a tenuous engagement with place embedded in the migratory experience.
moving past this initial fear, i began to think about the idea of place and its relationship to the newly arrived. in his collection of essays, Memos on NonFiction, Nigerian writer and art critic Emmanuel Iduma suggests writing about place as considering the setting against which individual labour unfolds. understanding the infinite textures against which human experiences are produced and narrated — whether it’s in the intimacy of a private room or on the cobbled streets of a new city — becomes useful in presenting diverse, if sometimes speculative reflections on human life and its attendant mysteries. location serves to frame, distort and extend facets of being, offering new areas of experience and response.
of course, we can hardly think about place - and its offerings or lack thereof - without considering structures of access and restriction embedded in their very creation. a formative and lingering quality of our world is rooted in codes of belonging and alienation. we define a city/town by our experience of sameness and difference. as such, the first task of the newly arrived is to begin a process of unravelling and understanding. we begin to work at uncovering transparencies in hopes that we become more transparent. all these tasks put forth before the errant individual aren’t just so we understand, but also that we are understood or more appropriately, not misunderstood.
in his foundational work ‘Poetics of Relation’, Edouard Glissant describes Relation as an extension of identity through a relationship with the Other. identity here is conceived as not existing entirely in rootedness but also in relational experience. this experience of difference is most visible in my consideration of place and forms the crux of this collection of essays. we understand place through the lens of relation. words like home, diaspora, familiar, strange, foreigner, and indigene become tools for defining spatialities.
how then do we mediate our constantly evolving relationship with space and land? how do we imagine the construction of experiences and identities against constant movement through changing landscapes; from sweltering harmattans to chilly autumns? how do we experience knowledge from the familiar to the unknown and unknowable? in reading Glissant, we begin to imagine the post-colonial reality(ies) as navigating and experiencing multiplicities of cultural influences, a way of understanding — or at least attempting to understand — the totality of the world. The act of migration, whether in the form of errantry or more commonly, self-mandated exile becomes a way to examine the relationship between people and places.
Iduma writes of the freedom of the migrant with the vastness of the world; how do these freedoms conflate against the alienation of exile and the impenetrability of modern borders? dual concepts in Glissant’s text stand out in the production of these essays; exile/errantry, root/rhizome. these ideas undergird my ongoing exploration of migratory, itinerant and diasporic thought. how do the conflicting but not entirely dissimilar notions of the root and rhizome contribute to the limiting or expansion of knowledge and an experience of the totality of the world or at least attempts at it?
the artists presented in this project stem from a personal encounter with either person or practice in hopes of understanding in part, their relationship to place through their artistic practice and shared parts of their personal lives. how do i reconcile the various responses, both in artistic output and private musings in the light of my own recent movement across geographies? a journey steeped in ambiguities and barely formed reflections.
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