‘the act of walking through, about, or over; travel through and traverse’

Publication in
English, Russian and Arabic

Co-edited by
Karina El Helou and
Arie Amaya- Akkermans

Supported by non-profit platform
Studiocur/art

As an online platform, at the cross-section of contemporary art with theory and archives, Perambulation responds to the challenge presented by the emergence of global histories, at the heart of the political imagination of (post)modernity. Firmly anchored in the context of the periphery, looking at the outer borderlands of European modernity, the focus of Perambulation is on the Eastern Mediterranean, Russia and the Caucasus. This shift and emphasis of Perambulation in regard to these regions, independently of each other and as a contiguous construction, is the imperative of moving away from depleted concepts such as “Global South”, and from standard binary frameworks of globalization histories embedded in Western hegemony as a narrative center. Perambulations intends to publish original, commissioned texts by artists, curators and cultural practitioners working across interdisciplinary lines in the following cities and their surrounding regions: Beirut, Baghdad, Istanbul, Moscow, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Damascus, Cairo, Athens, Nicosia and Tbilisi.

‘Perambulating the bounds’ is a medieval custom in which prominent members of a community will walk around the geographic boundaries of their locality for the purpose of keeping alive the memory of the precise location of these borders. As a platform, Perambulation, situating itself in a multipolar, decentered world, will perambulate the bounds of cities across the borders of real and imagined, contiguous but not continuous, geopolitical bodies. We attempt to problematize rather than to decipher identities, putting them against themselves and each other. Inside this large but invisible body, subsequently to include even more fragmentary geographies within, Perambulation articulates variation, diversity and often conflict. On the borderlands, laboratories of modernity, often excluded from the timezone of progress, while remaining a wasteland of historical debris, the project of the Enlightenment appears in a less universal light: Part of a world-system of ongoing colonization. The singularity of the multiple globals begins to emerge here as a countermeasure to disestablish power and as a result, produce our own images and representations.