The need for getting to know a place is even more relevant in a world where people’s lives are more mobile than ever. Sociologists Anthony Elliott and John Urry examine this increased mobility, investigating how it changes behaviour and transforms everyday lives. Yet despite this mobility, Elliott and Urry point out that attachment to place remains important. (Elliott and Urry, 2010) As social scientist and geographer Doreen Massey highlighted, people move in and out of spaces all the time, and through this process of movement people form a ‘progressive sense of place’ (Savage et al., 2005, p. 6.) and as sociologists Mike Savage, Gaynor Bagnall and Brian Longhurst point out ‘there is thus no one space where we feel at home all the time’ (Savage et al., 2005, p. 10).
This exhibition explored translocal experiences and the ways in which they impact perceptions of what it feels like to be rooted in a place. The exhibition was not just about the cities themselves, but rather about the ‘cross-linking, feedbacking, constantly shifting and reciprocal relations’ (Rendall, 2001, p. 108) that continue to take place when getting to know a locality. This is not a process that has an end point, rather it is a negotiation where feeling completely at home in a place can perhaps never be fully achieved.
The exhibition explored everyday objects and interactions in city environments with the aim of investigating what it means to feel like a local. Through associational, lateral and unexpected angles, objects and moments in the streets of Barcelona and Melbourne were tracked from diverse perspectives. The works in the exhibition untangled the layered experience of living translocally – where it is no longer about the clash of two cultures but is rather about the intermingling of several – and the questions about belonging that this process raises.
Claire Rosslyn Wilson 