The found objects tell us stories of travel paths, places, and people. In their state of ‘dormancy’ they acquire a patina of nostalgia, which they might lose when returned or released into the next cycle of existence. Fundbüro, a space for objects in transition, gains its particular identity not only from accumulation but also from the systematic documentation of origins related to the places and conditions in which objects were found. While at the Fundbüro, these objects become ‘other’ and narrate multiple stories in this space, which give them the transient uniqueness they will lose once found by the owner.
All these objects are at distance – from their former owners, their predetermined functions, and their contexts. At the Fundbüro each object is listed with an awareness of other places: it is here for the time being, but it existed elsewhere. While it is only an object, it contains the potential of the multiple, in terms of function and its links to a former/future owner.
Playing with notions of distance, the research initiative FUNDBÜRO wishes to set in motion objects/ideas across its network between Johannesburg and Lyon. The geographical distance that separates the two research teams offers opportunities to engage in acts of replay and reproduction. As ideas and objects are displaced, they become invested with new possibilities for existence. FUNDBÜRO also wishes to provide a node to the collective in which the strategies and tactics of taking distance from chosen objects or from sets of theories are considered so as to reinvest them with ‘other’ narratives: these ‘other’ stories defy and challenge the cultural environments in which they originate. Like the office of the lost and found, the aim of our collaborative theory and art production is to allow our research objects to gain their dimensions and relevance through exchanges between FUNDBÜRO members, who liberate these objects from a singular intention, opening up possibilities for multiple existences.
Without declaring it our primary intention, we believe that in this way we are opening meaningful paths of cultural production through mobility, which, according to Pannewick (2010: 245), come into being through ‘a continuous flux, a syncretical and ongoing process of exchange, interactions, and creative overlaps’.
FUNDBÜRO’s core ambition is to liberate the research object from its link to a single author: considered and reconsidered by the collective it becomes a multiple, and emerges in various formats and iterations. In his book Genesis, Michel Serres (1997: 87) talks of ‘a new object for philosophy’: the multiple. He wishes ‘to raise the brackets and parentheses [. . .] whereby we shove multiplicities under unities’, inviting us to reflect on the question, ‘Can I possibly speak of multiplicity itself without ever availing myself of the concept?’ In our research initiative we introduce the collective ‘we’ as an embodied strategy to reflect on the multiple. Accepting multiplicity as a principle of action, production, and thinking, FUNDBÜRO allows fragments – emerging actions – to steer thinking processes concerning relationships and connectivities, inviting the nomadic, the ‘provisoire’, and the contingent to inform the paths along which complex thinking travels and in which we invest collectively. Serres (ibid.: 88) names this possibility ‘a set undefined by elements or boundaries. Locally, it is not individuated; globally, it is not summed up’.
The format of the multiple seems especially appropriate in the context of two locations and cultures as in the course of our dialogues we create both expanded thinking and temporal spaces, which necessarily engage acts of augmented trans-lation and tra-duction. In the interactions between Lyon and Johannesburg we understand our task as ‘mobilisers’ – agents, translators, go-betweens who consider the ‘contact zones’ to be central to our theoretical investigation (Greenblatt 2010).
The two projects, Field Notes and I had a Dream, which we present further on in this paper, serve as examples of how a number of ideas and methods come into play and interaction, allowing FUNDBÜRO members to engage in speculative discussions on common characteristics and emerging meta topics. These projects are concrete reference points that let us draw various links, which we then observe as they develop into constellations. The term ‘constellation’ was introduced by Catherine Beaugrand during the seminar at Valence, France, in November 2013, to describe several key characteristics for grasping the idea of multiplicity and its advantages, including the capacity to project, imagine, and accept distance and time as co-related factors informing our observations, and allowing us to link different points, which, without losing their specificity, may be recognised as part of a larger picture.