Process: Chance trajectories, placenames & memory

In an attempt to play with the tension between personal information and what I perceived as potentially ‘cold’ impersonal technologies, I inserted personal identifiers into on-line mapping and database software. In this manner, I found topographical markers throughout Quebec and Sweden, which bear my interwoven family names: my adoptive and birth names.

Though choosing placenames of my family names as a starting point was more of a formal device to map out my excursion, the project does call up genealogical practices in the tracing of a family tree. Landmarks instead of blood can be used to indicate a sort of lineage.

I chose bodies of water as the main topographical area to explore because their interconnected, meandering structures resemble family relationships. Like a lake forming from an undulating river, like a river running dry and cutting off from another body of water, family ties are never static and are constantly evolving.

I was also drawn to water because of the occasional discrepancy between official names of lakes and the names given to them by local residents. This half-hidden history is sometimes reflected in maps but more so through storytelling. As my family names share the same placenames, I would be interested in how these markers in nature are repositories for memory, carrying varied meanings and associations for different people.

Using my family names was then a conceptual device to set out a trajectory - a random sampling of Quebec and Sweden. In fact, the waypoints are widely spread out: in Quebec they range from the Abitibi region to the Gaspésie and in Sweden, they are dispersed from the Northern Laplands to the Southern provinces of Gävleborg and Södermanland. I was inspired by Duchamp's Réseaux des 3 stoppages étalons series worked on between 1913 and 1915.

Network of Stoppages/Réseaux des stoppages étalon.
Marcel Duchamp, Paris, 1914. Oil and pencil on canvas. 148.9 x 197.7 cm.
The Museum of Modern Arts, New York.

"The 3 stoppages étalons are one-meter-long straight wires that fall from a height of one meter and are deformed by landing on a horizontal plane. The three different forms are three of the possible forms infinite forms – not rectilinear but curvilinear – of the unit of measure determined by chance. The Résaux des 3 stoppages d’étalon is a canvas with nine itineraries each one-meter long, each laid out using its own individual geometry."
— Hyper Architecture: Spaces in the Electronic Age, Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi, Birkhäuser: Basel, 1999. (p.34)

Duchamp transformed his units of measurements into a new geometry by using chance elements, factors he could not control. I too wanted to use chance elements to determine a physical itinerary. I let the Placenames results dictate my waypoints. Though I started off with specific criteria — my adoptive and birth names — I would venture that chance did play a role in the interaction of these two families.

The easiest path accessible by bike creates the path on a digital canvas — a sort of automatic tracing or mapping. The bicycle is a stand-in for the Rolling Studio: the artist studio on wheels.

I am now in the process of traveling to each of these placenames and gathering data on bodies of water, with the occasional bridge and land formation. As the use of the GPS allows me to find and map out the latitude and longitude coordinates of the geographic areas to be explored, it is an important tool cycling in areas that are foreign to me.

Yet, even ‘armed’ with a GPS, I still imagine an archive documenting my state of being lost. Will the newest orienting technologies necessarily make my path more certain? Getting lost is not necessarily a setback as I believe the state of being lost has the potential for opening people up to new experiences and encounters. And so I am not only drawing the ‘right path’ to each destination, but including the re-routes, the circling-back and the dead-ends as well. Unhinged from the map, they become drawings, embroidery, loose threads.