A Collaborative Poetic Prelude to Ambiguities

• In Event: Gradients-in-Relation: Distance as Continuous Variations in Artography

Abstract

Objectives or purposes:

The purpose of our inquiry is to foster sensory dimensions of understanding and unfolding notions of distance (physically and psychologically). Although we are both originally from Iran and we are members of the same doctoral cohort, due to the pandemic, we have never met in person. We continue to cultivate a close relationship by setting a proposition to ‘walk together,’ even though we are 3540 kilometers apart in two countries.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework:

We undo our spatial and physical distances and examine our mobilities through the act of writing and art-making. Walking constitutes the mobility of the subject and the mobility of the seen objects, and simultaneously disrupts ordinary assumptions that define different scales. By exchanging visual and textual artworks, we explore gradients of information between us to rupture this forced physical distance and open a fertile third space for negotiation, as well as greater connection and communication (Bhabha, 1994/2004). By seeing possibilities and recognizing limitations, we utilize our joint experience as a process; we translate our active thoughts, emotions, and senses into an image; the image is then translated into poetic writing and shared virtually; followed by site-specific walking to evoke another response in turn.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry:

When we walk artographically, we are vigorously extending our bodies to the spaces of encounter, drawing a line with our bodies to trace the gaps between us and between real and imagined destinations. We recognize multiple relationalities: image meets image, text meets image, text meets text, and we each meet these materials. The distance is not measurable anymore; it is non-ordinal and non-measurable.
Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
Poetic writing as data is a journey with words and sentences. Similar to art-making and walking, it involves the movement of thoughts, so we employ poetic writing to attend to our sensitivities to the world around us, to the rhythm of our breath and bodily movement. This is reminiscent of the material and immaterial traces emerging from shared conversations (Anderson 2004). The sound of nature, the texture of the ground, the angle of light: All provoke and evoke us and takes us on another journey.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view:

When we poetically express our living inquiry in correspondence to our walking experience, we linger, flow and move with words and translate our walking visually, into phrases and sentences. Writing and exploring the images that we capture in our walks and e-sharing them allows us to revisit our own embodied experience of this moment, and invites walking in-between the lines of our poetic writing.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work:

We embrace an aesthetic awareness to wonder, while trusting uncertainty as we wander. We blur the line between virtual and actual distances and distances in the making of art. Walking with poetry offers an opportunity for feeling the body, leading to another form of attunement with the world, yet always as an ambiguous third space.

Authors

• Elmira Sarreshtehdari, University of British Columbia

• Yasaman Moussavi, University of British Columbia