Where are you from?_Stories, 2002-2009, is a net-art piece supported by a one-year research grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. The videos for the net-art piece were selected from approximately 200 15-minute videos captured in special events organized in 6 world cities. The 55 videos selected are hyperlinked to a vocabulary of keywords extracted from the videos in three languages (English, Spanish, French).
“Where are you from?_Stories” is an interactive and participatory work that deploys itself in both physical and virtual space (engaging Latin American sites and subjects, and the internet) in order to expose tensions between diverse places as sites of belonging, connection or disconnection. The project synthesises my explorations on translocality, interculturality, the hybridisation of media, and the convergence of technological and social space around questions of inhabitation/cohabitation. For this project I developed an intercultural co-construction process, where the task of narration was split among authors/participants from different countries, and where the computer acted as mediator. The work displays an integrative approach in its use of media and documentary practices, striving for social inclusion and shared authority through interactive storytelling.
This is a temporal work inscribed at the crossroads between ethnographic practices, documentary photography and video, oral history, and interactive internet-based art forms. The multi-year project involved the organization of live international events held in public spaces during which participants contributed stories about home, displacement, and notions of a better life. As of 2009, the work has had a 7-year trajectory through several world cities culminating in a web-site archive including 55 three-minute video clips (selected from 130) presenting oral testimonies in three languages: English, French and Spanish. Visual anthropologist Flavia Caviezel comments: “Badani’s project holds up a mirror to technologically mediated modes of communication today and to their impact on issues of identity.” Caviezel further adds that the work reveals “complex relations between centers and peripheries, as well as between people and the places to which they belong”. [5]
I was motivated to do the project as a result of a recurrent situation upon immigrating to Chicago from Paris in 1999. During long daily bus rides between work and home, I invariably broke into conversation with other travelers. At the sound of my slight accent they would ask: “Where are you from?” This was the launch of an interesting and unusually intimate conversation during which I discovered that a great number of my interlocutors also had an accent and came from elsewhere. Because the quality of the encounter was as rich as the stories told, specifically in relation to their pertinence vis-à-vis globalization and interculturality, I decided to create a documentary artwork based on this experience. I framed the physical component of the project around my personal geography through 6 world cities—six locations whose culture and language I am familiar with in Latin America and elsewhere—and further extended the project to other locations through the Internet. The physical manifestation of the project involved creating live events in 6 cities (in Argentina, Mexico, USA, Canada and France) during which I launched conversations with passers-by asking a universal question that everyone can relate to: "Where are you from?" I then involved participants in a co-creative process during which I video-taped testimonies about where they came from and where they were going, presumably to seek a “better life.”
The computer acted as mediator in that I used the online environment to archive and broadcast tri-lingual videotaped narratives. This online environment is a transcultural possibility space of dialogue and conversation [6], a space of reception and exchange where viewers may see and hear strangers telling stories on the Internet. Thus, the project converges the movement of populations and technologically mediated stories of these populations on the Internet with the aim of sending, receiving, importing, and exporting ideas of a “better life”.
The quest for a better life—presumably located elsewhere—is a distinctive characteristic of modern living where “home” is no longer a fixed place. In his book The Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha claims that: "It is the trope of our times to locate the question of culture in the realm of the beyond, ” [7] a word that marks progress by promising the future. Bhabha states that for many, the promise of a better life allows for the re-definition of place and belonging in a hybrid site often located between cultural traditions and historical periods. Along similar lines, social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai views electronic mediation and migration as the most important factors defining today’s global world. He claims that territoriality is replaced by translocalities, thanks to migrating peoples as well as to the electronically mediated movement of ideas, values, life-styles, and everyday lives that modify cultural spaces and cultural worlds. [8] My videotaped stories conducted between 2002 and 2009, support Bhabha’s and Appadurai’s arguments by presenting “social actors” that negotiate hybrid identities and multilevel affiliations to home and nation.
“Where are you from?_Stories” shows how emerging technologies allow for the co-existence of multiple threads from participants, a feature of internet technologies highlighted in the essay written by Paraguai and Pardo in 2001: “virtual/real communication allows users to coexist/operate in several ‘worlds’, to be ‘atHome’ and at the same time itinerant and ‘distributed’, offering alternative possibilities of presence and encounters.” [9] Thus, the project offers a means through which to inspect elements and behaviors related to contemporary nomadism, displacement and relocation, phenomena involving reciprocal permeation, intercultural cohabitation, and hybridization. Those confronted with the internet-based work simulate travel by choosing a journey through the hyperlinked video-taped stories and co-experience displacements, transferences, transpositions, and translations. This work exemplifies aesthetic tactics of infiltration and cohabitation, and the co-mingling of intercultural realities, times and spaces. The viewer/participant navigates through divergent intercultural viewpoints, and is able to composite stories in an individualized way – an experience that leads to new webs of signification through the re-creation of narrative threads.
Paper presented during New Forms Festival: International Festival of Media Arts, Vancouver, Canada (2004), and during FILE - ELECTRONIC LANGUAGE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2005): https://www.scribd.com/document/3176215/FILE-SYMPOSIUM-2005
http://patbadani.net/where_from2.html
Pat Badani