Perambulation 01
“However contiguous these regions are, we do not conceive of the border as a cartographic topos, but rather as a situation — a shared territory unfolding in units of disjointed contemporary time”
Perambulating bounds, crossing borders and cross pollinating them sits at the heart of our idea for an online platform that would bring together artists, curators and researchers to discuss the borderland, the porous border of modernity’s outer edges between Russia and the Near East. However contiguous these regions are, we do not conceive of the border as a cartographic topos, but rather as a situation — a shared territory unfolding in units of disjointed contemporary time. In this shapeless time, what the discourse about contemporary art is or could be, is something we are curious to find out, in an era of intellectual exhaustion and epistemological depletion. More than medium, we conceive of art as a place for encounters and singularities. We start out in the first issue right at home in the Levant, a territory of transitions, constantly rearranged borders and near infinite impossibilities. Indeed, a place intensely embedded in time.
The first issue begins with a tripartite conversation: Co-editor Arie Amaya-Akkermans, based in Istanbul, penned an essay conceived as a parafiction around the city of Antioch and its surrounding region, annexed by Turkey from the French Mandate of Syria in the 1930s and woven around a strange ancient monument in the outskirts of the modern city and the artwork “Under a Cold River Bed” by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. The Lebanese artist duo Hadjithomas & Joreige is vividly present as well in the issue, with an extended interview with editors Arie Amaya-Akkermans and Karina El-Helou, on the topic of their long-term project “I Stared At Beauty So Much”, dwelling on the necessity of poetry and beauty in times of darkness and upheaval, reflecting on the aftermath of the Beirut blast that partially destroyed the city in August 2020.
Syrian artist Simone Fattal wraps up the Levantine journey of Amaya-Akkermans and Hadjithomas/Joreige with a personal text and chronic about travels and peregrinations in the Ottoman Levant at the beginning of the 20th century, portraying a world without the contemporary borderwork, and reflecting on the possibility of coexistence. In a similar vein, archaeologist Luc Bachelot and cinema scholar Rose-Marie Godier wrote a joint text on “Route 181” an speculative utopia of Israel-Palestine by filmmakers Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan, anchored in the road movie, contrasted with the Epic of Gilgamesh, as an allegory for friendship and communities of solidarity. For every issue, Perambulation invites a contemporary artist from the surrounding region to show us around their studio practice and research: Russian artists Alexandra Paperno and Sveta Shuvaeva share with us their experience at Kolomna.
The editors
Karina El Helou & Arie Amaya-Akkermans