Between 2011 and 2014 I made a series of overland journeys partly on foot and mostly by hitch-hiking, experimenting with the idea of using a journey as a performative methodology in my artistic practice. I used those journeys, and the encounters with people along the way, to create psycho-geographic documentation of the places through which I passed. My first journey was along a series of lines through Europe (Diagonally Backwards, Diagonally Upwards) and later I travelled along the longest (imagined) straight line in the world – the border of the United States and Canada (Horizontally Backwards).
Influenced by Marc Augé’s notion of ‘non-place’, the Horizontally Backwards (and other lines) project focused on transit routes, rather than on places of noted significance. I worked on the principle that a road, while literally being a space between somewhere and somewhere else, contains and embodies the many different stories of those who pass through it. Rather than wishing to dictate that a particular story and a location were intrinsically linked, I wanted to explore the ideas of movement and staying still, and reflect poetically on the idea of passing through; the disconnectedness of doing so, and the idea that these liminal landscapes embody multiple subjectivities.
The full video can be seen here below, and an article published in Living Maps Review can be found here: http://livingmaps.review/journal/index.php/LMR/article/view/76/141
Excerpt from Horizontally Backwards (and other lines) Living Maps Review: Lines of Desire, Issue 3, 2017