The transit lounge is the archetypal transit space, the point where the hyper-global + hyper-local coincide; a location which blurs traditional conceptions of geo-political boundaries, creating pockets of international space within the borders of individual nation-states. An in-between space, it exists relative to a fixed departure and arrival point, not to the area that surrounds it.

The Transit Lounge is a series of overlapping residencies for Australian and German artists and architects in Berlin. It is also a blog where themes relating to the project will develop, collaborations will be initiated and sustained, and observations on the city collected. The Transit Lounge invites you to participate in these transnational conversations by commenting on the blog.

For more information email us: transit [AT] transitlounge [DOT] org

The transit lounge is supported by Culturia and the DAZ

Friday, November 24, 2006

The lead-up to Transit Lounge

With this first post, I would like to give a bit of a background to who I am, and what I am looking forward to most about being involved in Transit Lounge.
I'll start with where I am at the moment. I'm currently living in Sydney, Redfern to be exact, and working four days a week to earn enough money to get a plane ticket and live overseas for a few months next year.
With the rest of my time I try to work on my art. It's not an ideal set-up, which makes the incentive of next year's residency even more enticing.
I have deferred a Master's degree in visual arts so I have the possibility of working, thinking and writing in my own time.
I am looking forward to the learning experience that I expect working on Transit Lounge will provide me. What interests me most about this, is the collaborative process, and working with people who might have a totally different approach to thinking about and creating art.
I think that Berlin is the perfect backdrop for a project looking at transit in a virtual and physical sense: its itinerant population has transformed it into one big transit lounge.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

INTRODUCTION

Tickets booked, final grant applications in, all artists confirmed. Looks like we are all set to go for Transit Lounge Berlin 2007. A few changes from last year - we now have 16 participants, including 8 Germans. And this year, half the participants are architects.

Like last year, the blog is the virtual lounge; a place for all of us participants to discuss the themes, record observations and develop work in public. Its here that we can exchange words and images with the people we'll eventually be working with. But we're keen to take the blog beyond this - delving into topics somehow related to the theme Transit Lounge. To help us with that, Sarah Thompson + Alma-Elisa Kittner will take over the moderation of the blog for a month each. Sarah is keen to focus on the process of collaboration, while Alma will delve into issues of tourism, and in between , I want to develop my current obsession: transnational identities, migrations and nomadic lives.