Remoteness

What is not here? How does the remote imagine us, the people standing in for the local and drawing the line? I am traveling for the most parts, I have traveled from a house to a room, the sense of home contracted from a plot of land to a desk. What travels with me and what stays behind?

What remains remote and what gets localised again and again? We can get the easy responses out of the way first. So remoteness is not about coordinates. It is not about centres, peripheries and suburbs. For a moment, let's consider the idea of the labyrinth. If the labyrinth wanted to be navigable and easy to unravel, it would publish maps. It doesn't. A part of the idea of the labyrinth is the nature of a labyrinth, a map which is now scrambled. It plays games and it wants us to play-along.

The shape of the remote is similar. It is not something that we can map with individual bodies and questionnaires - it takes more. As a traveler there is present a constant duality in every singular experience. There are conversions of currency happening in the head, there are translations happening, there is a comparison of us and them. For how long? The duration of this span of time is the time it takes for the remote to come home. For distances to travel and flatten out. The remote comes back to itself and disappears.