return

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

'The Voyage': Rhizomatic Gift-giving Traveling Seminar
Rotterdam Arts and Sciences Lab (RASL); WdKA, Erasmus, CodArts, TUDelft, 2021 [rasl.nu]
with Gabija Bubnyte, Julia Gat, Betsie Loeffen and Sarah de Buck



A group of RASL students didn’t want to do a boring zoom conference for their self-organized thematic sessions so instead they recruited me to be bike messenger for a traveling rhizomatic conference extended over four days and 30 km of gift-giving, voyages and dispersed conversations.

Guiding us along was our map (as distinct from a tracing)— which was both an archive and a manifest (delivery list)— it is both the documentation of the doing, and it is doing the doing, keeping track of what happened and what is yet to come.

The map unfolds from the messenger tin— a box bike messengers use to keep their receipts dry and tidy from the rain. our map worked on 5 overlapping layers of facts, (of which their determinability is disturbed by the crossing of other facts):

- the messenger log of events and times],
- a map of rotterdam with tracings of the route taken to each house, including to delft, maasland and klaaswaal, on different scales],
- drawings of the gifts],
- active-bag inventories/delivery lists],
- and an account of emotions and well wishes to send to each other]

the map becomes not merely ‘research’, and not merely a research proposal, but a type of proposal for how to do research. … something about the knowledges we produce through durations and endurance… an orientation towards the relations-to-come through gift-giving.. the knowledges that come from many conversations and travels, the many iterations of travelers and visitors, across many homes and many days and many gifts. some type of knowledge in the stretching out to what comes next

“my territories are out of grasp, not because they are imaginary, but the opposite: because I am in the process of drawing them.”

“I am no more than a line. I have become capable of loving, not with an abstract, universal love, but a love I shall choose, and that shall choose me, blindly, my double, just as selfless as I.”