The central questions of the project had investigated how formal and informal nodes of transnational mobilities along the major road corridors in the triangle between Vienna, Tallinn, and the Turkish-Bulgarian border had been redeveloped and transformed since the fall of the Iron Curtain and the expansion of the European Union, and how these nodes, which others might perceive as typical non-places, are appropriated and transformed by mobile people into intimate anchors in the everyday lives of their multi-local existences.
Our toolkit of methods comprised the strategy of embedded research, which involved driving these routes ourselves in a mobile lab, performing interviews and mapping exercises at relevant sites along our paths, realising artistic interventions in public spaces, academic workshops, and exhibitions in Tallinn, Sofia, and Vienna, and trying to make both objects and subjects ‘speak’. This led to a continual rhythm of research, dissemination, and re-evaluation taking place almost simultaneously.
The aesthetic quality of the large-scale mappings and exhibited objects readily attracted people with different qualifications and backgrounds, and the universal readability of the visual languages we applied enabled them to easily join the project and bring their own individual mobility expertise. Hence, we were able to gain respect in the fields of mobilities research, arts-based research, urban studies, and from the many mobile subjects we encountered.
Push and pull factors
The selected case studies were characterised both by a variety of push and pull factors and different effects. In Tallinn a transnational road corridor changes into a ferry line. The driving forces for the enormous volume of passengers and cars between Tallinn and Helsinki was the radical difference of wages and the price of services and consumer goods in both countries. The rhythm of the arriving and departing ferries therefore has an enormous effect on the city – especially alongside the beaten paths of the tourists, where shops and kiosks pop up and close down on demand and buses, taxis, and cycle rickshaws wait for customers at the harbour terminal, the entrance to the Old Town, and the major malls. Alcoholic drinks can be pre-ordered in packages so one does not lose time. According to the harbour manager, alcohol drives the economy – while deprived Russians provide cheap labour and affluent Russians invest in real estate developments.
Additionally, Bulgaria had been a traditional transit nation: the important road corridor passing through Bulgaria and connecting Western Europe with Turkey and the Middle East offered chances for all kinds of legal and illegal business. Once the base of SOMAT, one of the biggest transport companies in Europe in Cold War times, today Bulgaria is a typical outsourcing destination for Western European enterprises, especially for logistics industries that register daughter companies in the low tax country and exploit badly paid drivers. Unlike in the ‘glory days’ of old, drivers no longer have chances to supplement their low income with personal side businesses because of permanent GPS controls and open EU borders.
Vienna International Bus Terminal is a node for the arrival and departure of several generations of low-wage service workers and their relatives to and from the neighbouring Slavic countries as well as from Romania and Bulgaria. For many of them, buses are the preferred means of transport, not only because of the reasonable ticket prices but moreover because buses can bring them much closer to their target destinations and can also transport goods of significant size, which is important for small suitcase traders and for bringing gifts for family members and friends.
After the wave of refugees in autumn 2015 we refocused on migration management and border logistics, also learning that customs offices had been the main employers in all the border areas we passed through during our trips and that it had been the bureaucratic obstacles and the severity of border controls that increased the value of expertise in how to successfully pass them – whether legally or illegally. The economic interests of these local networks will keep these borders much more permeable than politicians might wish they were.
The notion of public spaces in transition
With regard to the issues in the call for ‘Public Spaces in Transition’, the key method of our project – driving along the PAN-European road corridors with our own vehicle – enabled us to recognise a wide variety of qualities of ‘publics’ and ‘places’ as well as the quite different ways of appropriation and the effects of urban transformation. This variety is exemplary in the three central case studies.
The area of Tallinn harbour was entirely closed off during the socialist period. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the harbour – formerly used for cargo of all sorts – was transformed into a passenger terminal for ferries and later also for cruise ships. The harbour is located on public ground and managed by the state. But because the terminal buildings represent a transnational border and are a high-risk target for terror attacks, they are highly controlled, like international airports. Although the ferry lines are run privately, they are seen as a means of public transport servicing tourists and commuters.
The network of the former state monopolist company SOMAT for transnational cargo transport in socialist Bulgaria was, of course, based on state-run facilities and infrastructure, which had also been used for the private side-businesses of the truck drivers. In the first period of transformation and privatisation a range of privately operated service stations and kiosks popped up along the main roads, which were appropriated for all kinds of business and social interaction. But with the expansion of the EU and large-scale infrastructure programs these smaller semi-formal nodes of interaction are being repressed by a new set of regulations.
Vienna International Bus Terminal has suffered a series of dislocations over time as it was increasingly shunned by public authorities because of its reputation since the 1960s as a harbour for labour migrants and since 1989 for shipping migrants from South-Eastern European countries. Managed by a private company, it is located today beneath a highway bridge on a piece of land owned by a 100-per-cent daughter company of the state. The buses and bus lines are owned by a variety of private companies, mainly from Eastern European destination countries, and again are considered by passengers to be public lines. Although privately run, this terminal is accessible day and night.
Reflection on methods
Developing methods to engage fluidly with ongoing mobile practices on the roads, at borders, and at the transport nodes of Europe, both by being on the road and through the use of drawing as a means of elicitation and conversation, did not always work as fluidly as we imagined. Driving the corridors opened our eyes to so many spaces worth investigation. But the tight schedule did not allow us to stop wherever we desired, and if we stopped we had to painfully decide to ignore or dismiss most of these spaces. Drawing also required much more time for preparation than expected. It could not be practised at each place and in the format we intended, and it was driven as much by our own curiosity and expectations as it was by the narrations of our onsite informants. If ‘maps were always arguments about the way the maps’ makers thought the world should be’ (Wood 2015, 306) then this entire presentation also reflects our selective way of wishful thinking about these spaces of transition.
The informal nature of our mobility and of our creative practice allowed us to get close to the people and infrastructures that use and facilitate a range of mobilities, including shipping, working, trade, and migration.
The size of our vehicle and trailer automatically predetermined the places where we parked or stayed overnight, at parking lots for lorries and TIR stops, protected areas for international truck drivers, where we were literally embedded in the social field of our research. But often we were identified as non-professionals or even absolute beginners, having a car not as heavily loaded as all the others, not knowing a thing about how to fill in papers and bribe border control staff or police officers. For us, being stopped in a control for legal or criminal reasons (by official border control, by police officers gaining extra money into their private pockets or, even, by fake officers), what otherwise would be an embarrassing interruption of a trip, became an exciting subfield of research. And even the seemingly endless time spent driving the pan-European corridors was not considered ‘dead time’ in our minds but rather a productive period for rediscussing and re-evaluating interim research findings and for improving and preparing methods for conversation and elicitation to be applied at the next stop.
While we investigated how other people are ‘doing with space’ at these nodes and what these spaces are doing with them, we became aware of how we ourselves were ‘doing with space’, what it does to us in return and to the people we invited to join us: whether while driving, selecting the nodes to stop at, setting up the mobile display at specific places, performing while drawing, or dramaturgically arranging the relations of objects and people in workshop spaces, for interventions in public space, and also for exhibitions.
The transition of the eastern frontier of Europe, a place of becoming, with borders changing and new roads implemented, is a blurred, unstable space marked by mobility and informal activities, which can only be traced and investigated with the means of mobile strategies – such as nomadic ethnography, whose field works are the nodes where this hidden world becomes temporarily tangible. By exploring interconnections between the personal and the geopolitical, this project demonstrates the spatial and historical complexities of European networks, and it has become particularly timely with regards to migration management, the threat of new/old borders brought about by the restrictive policies of Eastern European nations, and Brexit, the prospective withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union.
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