Reframing the blog - repetition

"How can you disturb the linearity of spaces?"

One strategy for me to reframe the blog will be the repetition: I just catch some words, some sentences, some images to activate them again - to break the linearity of the blog, to create a new context for them, to create a re-collage. the repetition is never the same.

so don't wonder...

What's your Egypt?

Dear all,

I'm sorry - I vanished for a time because I moved and was in a state of transit that didn't give me so much space to reflect on transit itself...

But now it's over and I try again to create a kind of blog moderator. (suggestions/ideas about what to do as a blog moderator are always welcome!)

Easter and Pessah is over now - and anyway I'm not religious. But I believe, that all these stories and myths are still circulating and they are deeply rooted in our (western) cultural/individual archive of imagination. That's why I just want to recollect the story : The jews flew from Egypt to the "Holy Land", so they were migrating. That's why they eat until nowadays this special kind of bread that doesn't take to much time to prepare: a migration bread, a transit bread. Jesus turned/translated this physical migration into a more spiritual transition.
But anyhow: "Egypt" means "frontier, limit, barrier" in Hebrew. So today Pessah means to cross inner boarders, to overrun the personal "Egypt" inside oneself.

I find that story interesting, because it's not only a story about transit but also about the opposite of transit: about boarders, limits, barriers - and maybe swells (the red sea?).
And I asked myself if the transit doesn't always rely on limits. There's an interdependence, a reciprocal figure in it. Because you need a limit to feel the transgression - and where is the space in between, the swell?

See you this evening

Alma

Reframing the blog?

According to Vassilieas's idea it would be nice to re-frame the blog continuously.
Maybe we could try to develop step by step a kind of "cyclopedia of transit" by using constantly the possibility of "labeling" our posts. Finally the rhizomatic structure of the transit-network and transit-ideas would be reflected in that kind of "cyclopedia" (anyway it will be like that, but I suggest to reflect that reflection).
What do you think about it? And what do you think about the blog as a of tool for communication and "representation"?

First "Hello" from Alma in Berlin

Hello to everybody,

my name is Alma, I live in Berlin and will be one of the blog moderators, though I'm still wondering, what a "blog moderator"really IS - but as we all are more or less dealing with "floating subjects and identities" (and what is THAT?) I'm sure that I will find a way how to generate a floating moderator...

I'm very happy to take part in the Transitlounge 2007 - in 2006 I was a visitor and I liked the way how Miriam and Katie managed it to focus more on processes than on products (everybody is speaking about that - but only a few people are able to realize it).

Apart from my interest in processes I'm also linked with Transitlounge by my research project on tourism and art. In my opinion every artist that takes part in an "artist-in-residence-program" is a kind of tourist - so most of you will soon follow some of the tourist's paths in Berlin. As your steps are led by images and imaginations about Berlin I'm interested in the way how you now create your "mental map" of Berlin (before you go there), how you will realize that map and how you will surely always change and re-create it (when you're here) and last but not least how you'll reconstruct "Berlin" when you're back in Australia.

That's why I don't plan to be your guide - I suggest that it'll be better the other way round: Maybe I could follow you and your steps and you will be my guide. I want to be a kind of shadow - but an active one who speaks to you, who asks some questions, who collects your images and words and who tries to connect them a little bit. So that's my first step in trying to be a moderator: to create a visible and unvisible shadow.
Hope you'll like it.

Happy to see you soon
and best wishes from Berlin

Alma

BIOGRAPHY: ALMA-ELISA KITTNER

Alma-Elisa Kittner is an arts historian from Berlin, Germany. After studying art history, communication and Modern German Literature in Munich and Rome she continued with art history and Modern German Literature in Bochum, Germany.

In 2005 she wrote the concept for a congress on “Topology Of Travel” in Trier at the Centre for Postcolonial and Gender Studies (CePoG), was published in the “Volksbühne Berlin” brochure on “Utopic Body Concepts” and did research work in Paris with Harald Szeeman. She is also a writer and lector for the Westerweide Publishing Company and was chief editor of the k&m magazine (‘art and material’).

She is currently curating Contest of the Arts, a series of talks in Berlin on media, event-strategies and tourism involving artists + theorists from various European countries.

She has a long-standing interest in tourism, and is currently working on a project on art and tourism in Berlin while she has a stipend at the International Research Training Group “Interart Studies” as a post-doc academic at the Free University Berlin.