Conclusions
What did we learn from our projects?
The idea of FUNDBÜRO: working with objects – lost, found, how they are categorised – across distance.
Importance and transformative potential of playfulness.
1. From an initial understanding of distance as linear – either negative, in the sense of separation and the space to be bridged, or positive, in allowing us to move away from a myopic to a more comprehensive way of seeing – we now realise that the linear model is inadequate to grasp processes involved in memories, dreams, narratives. We understand that distance needs to be related to movement. A better representation of distance is rendered through the image of the constellation, allowing for multiple points and shifting relationships. We also began conceiving of distance as conveying progress – as in the distance we have covered.
The projects help us complicate something that started as a matter of concern for two groups of researchers who wanted to cross a space, rather than think how to cross it. It is therefore not a matter for concern, but an energising space – a catalyser that allows us to explore the potentials of translation/traduction as producers of further meaning and that carries back to each research unit new precision to think the ‘local’.
2. The collective moment liberates us from the need to claim something that either might not be ours or may be too close to us. As Barthes (1998) and others have made us aware, limits are imposed by the idea of one author. As a collective we challenge those limits and break open knowledge fields. For example, field notes can become conversation pieces where Füsun and Benjamin are imaginary partners on an equal footing. Thus, field notes become tools for traversing apparently unconnected fields. This does not mean that we wish to move away entirely from the responsibility of laying the foundation and setting in place the investigative processes. In the course of our projects we have explored a notion of generative authorship.
3. We became convinced that in the context of trading, stories can be as concrete and valuable as any commodity. Under these circumstances, narratives can be activated, reconfigured, redeployed. By trading commodities and narratives, traders and consumers ‘write’ the city. Their narratives, anecdotes, or stories reveal, connect or transgress, empower or commemorate a moment and a place in time, often connecting a ‘here’ with an ‘elsewhere’ (e.g., the country of origin, the space of religion, the future destination). ‘Stories thus carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places. They also organize the play of changing relationships between places and spaces’ (Certeau 1984, 118).
4. What seems so ultimately simple and accessible to anyone (from the smallest child to the oldest person, across languages and cultures) – the dreamscape – is a universe that remains remarkably elusive when considered as a potential body of knowledge to be saved into the day’s realities. Dreams provide an immense reservoir of imagery and narratives, which artists seem well equipped to tap into: poetry, performance, and other forms of art allow an immersion into this universe that stands in opposition to the rational documentation undertaken by other disciplines. Multiple authorship in the context of ‘dream work’ would seem a most adequate approach to our topic, allowing for the creation of differing, coexisting rhythms, as it induces stumbling into a new dimension. Simondon (1989) speaks of collective engagement as something that would create the possibilities of falling out of step with ourselves. We acknowledge, however, that these continued attempts to work with dream material, as undertaken over the past months, have allowed us to develop a type of expertise we are still struggling precisely to define.
The FUNDBÜRO derives its collective power through theorising concrete projects. These projects direct a kind of thinking, which we believe becomes pertinent beyond the field of the arts. These projects also inform us about modes and modalities of collaborative working processes – the assembly line, the drawing processes informing protocols, the creation of fictional and real dialogue – that are further tested and critically analysed in the expanded space of the FUNDBÜRO.
This exposition, as we have said, is but an interim report of a shifting and evolving constellation.
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