V<\/span>acZineNations!<\/em> and the broader <Immune Nations><\/em> project were international in their breadth and reach. Artists and designers located in four countries (and a greater number of nationalities) came together to work on the three component projects of VacZineNations!<\/em>; the outcomes were produced in China, the UK, Armenia, and Canada, and exhibited in the UK, Norway, and Switzerland. Our working practice engaged both face-to-face and mediated forms of communications (such as email and Skype) to devise and produce the works together and at a distance. The use of such blended modes of communication and approach may seem an obvious solution to the practicalities of a geographically dispersed project, but as my doctoral research revealed, in participatory art, the face-to-face mandate of socially engaged practices in contemporary art and practices in media art that engage communications technologies are often segregated.<\/p>\n

Rudolf Frieling, curator of media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, provides evidence of the problem in what he calls a \u201cgap\u201d between socially engaged practices in contemporary art, and practices that actively engage with the interconnected conditions of networked society and the impacts of globalization (32). I position my research within this supposed gap with the aim to reveal the characteristics of this distinct zone of art practice, and to articulate the reasons why artists might work this way. The research investigates how dialogue-based social practices in art, extended and augmented by mediated communications, enable an expanded social practice in dialogue with geographer Tim Cresswell\u2019s ideas of the (geo) \u201cpolitics of mobility\u201d (On the Move<\/em>; \u201cTowards a Politics of Mobility\u201d), the forces that affect and control the conditions of human movement.<\/p>\n

As previously mentioned, my primary collaborator through both the PhD research and VacZineNations!<\/em> was Armenian artist Mkrtich Tonoyan, whose mobility is conditioned by virtue of his citizenship, his economic situation, and his role within an extended family. Armenians need visas to travel to most countries, and Tonoyan\u2019s circumstances lie in stark contrast to my own. As a dual citizen of the UK and Canada, I experience a freedom of mobility unequalled by the majority of the world\u2019s citizens. However, as demonstrated by the UK Government\u2019s decision to leave the European Union, and global travel restrictions in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, such freedoms are contingent and fragile. Cresswell\u2019s terminology of the \u201ckinetic elite\u201d and the \u201ckinetic underclass\u201d are useful to consider here (On the Move<\/em> 255). Pre-COVID, Tonoyan and I both travelled extensively; we have worked together in nine countries since commencing our collaboration, including three workshops as part of <Immune Nations><\/em>, in Canada (2015), Switzerland (2016), and Norway (2017). While we both share the social and cultural capital of movement, the forces of geopolitics shape our individual experiences: the reasons for our movement, the routes we take, the velocity and rhythm of our journeys, the level of friction our movements produce, and the overall experience of travel. While I travelled to the <Immune Nations<\/em>> destinations with the ease of visa-free movement and direct flights, Tonoyan\u2019s travel was rarely smooth, burdened by the lengthy and costly process of visa applications, and indirect routes. Tonoyan has reflected on this situation as one that causes harm to his sense of professional self, as such frictioned mobility in relation to others translates into situations of professional unreliability (Tonoyan in Knowles 114). Perhaps most poignantly (and particularly so in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and the impact of social and spatial inequalities), integral to the politics of mobility is the embedded question of its inverse\u2014must we move? Tonoyan\u2019s international career as a contemporary artist necessitates the status of economic migrant, spending months each year in North America, Asia, or Europe undertaking opportunities for career development unavailable to artists within Armenia, where no formal arts funding exists, where infrastructure for contemporary art is limited, and with minimal visibility in the global contemporary art world. Negotiating geopolitical disparity, economic imbalance, and issues of mobility and cultural difference are the basis of the dialogue that informs our collaborative working relationship and the content of our dialogue-based practice, committed to social engagement and projects that are global in scope.<\/p>\n

The most productive approach for addressing the problem my thesis set out to investigate emerged through encounters with the concept of translocality. Understood most simply as connections between specific locations, translocality began to gain traction in academic discourse in the 1990s within the context of furthering a theoretical discourse of grounded, situated, or place-based transnationalism. Translocality has been defined as a cross-disciplinary (or post-disciplinary) research perspective most associated with the disciplines of geography, anthropology, history, area studies, cultural studies, and development studies (Greiner and Sakdapolrak 1). Geographers Katherine Brickell and Ayona Datta argue for a multi-scalar understanding of translocality beyond the discourse of national borders and international migrations, enabling the term to be deployed as an expression of \u201csimultaneous situatedness across different locales,\u201d with emphasis on communications and connectivity, no matter the proximity (4). It is Brickell and Datta\u2019s reading of translocality that my research employs, and in particular the evocative phrase \u201csimultaneous situatedness.\u201d Their multi-scalar understanding of translocality enables translocal methods to be applied to connections and communication across the world, across town, or across the hallway, acknowledging that interconnectivities across boundaries are as likely to occur close to home in an urban encounter as they are across international borders.<\/p>\n

\u201cTranslocal\u201d is a term that has been applied in communications research to address simultaneous situatedness in networked communications and the space of the internet itself (Lepp\u00e4nen et al.\u00a01081). It also operates as a highly apt descriptor of artist networks, projects, and practices that aim to bridge across locations and between people, and in this regard it is an apt descriptor for <Immune Nations><\/em>. An earlier example is The Syndicate Network<\/em>, a platform for media culture and art that in 1997 spanned 31 countries across the West, former East, and adjoining Europe. Andreas Broeckmann, director of V2 in Rotterdam during the years The Syndicate Network<\/em> was developed, provides this interpretation of the term: \u201cTranslocal means you are dealing with individual local situations but they are distributed within a larger geographical and cultural system. The global is locally embedded.\u201d I would add that in the translocal perspective the opposite holds equally true: the local is also globally embedded, with the global understood as the entirety of all local-local connectivity. Broeckmann goes on to describe The Syndicate Network<\/em> as an \u201cinformal network\u201d and an \u201cintercom\u201d for people in the media art community in Europe and beyond. \u201cAt the same time,\u201d he continues, \u201cthis intercommunication effects a re-mapping of cultural and mental territories that transcend the political, religious and territorial separations which we regard as a temporary nuisance, rather than as the last word on this imagined continent\/container\u201d (Broeckmann). Similarly, art historian Ewa Wojtowicz proposes the online listserv and net art community Nettime<\/em> as an example of a translocal artistic community, and a constituent element in these early years of network culture towards a project of art world decentralization. Like Broeckmann, Wojtowicz presents translocality as a postcolonial and resistant position that transposes geographic location to form new locales in the dispersed geographies of the internet (Wojtowicz). The aims that emerge from these writings of Broeckmann and Wojtowicz, examining the nascent years of network culture, suggest acts of cultural resistance towards disrupting the dominant narrative of free-market globalization. These projects present counternarratives that productively engage situatedness, connectivity, and a critical engagement with mobility towards re-mappings and alternative imaginings of global formations of communities. Inspired by these debates, we now see ourselves as artist\/researchers working in and towards a translocal art world that is globally interconnected but operates as a counternarrative to the international art world, the label associated with the global commercial art market exemplified by art fairs, biennales, dealers, and auction houses.<\/p>\n

Our commitment to translocal artistic practice responds to what Joaquin Barriendos Rodr\u00edguez proposes as the task of the translocal artist: the creation and distribution of critical and reflective articulations of multiplicity and global difference (352). For the kinetically elite artists and cultural workers with mobility-enabling passports, access to travel budgets, and the requisite social\/professional networks\u2014a set of conditions that certainly reflects my own situation situation in so-called normal times\u2014global mobility has become the marker of success, and for some artists, a medium of creative practice in itself. Indeed, for artists who associate with the term \u201cartist-nomad,\u201d mobility has become the preferred position for production. Art historian James Meyer unpacks the term into two differing approaches: the \u201clyrical nomad\u201d characterized by a personalized, poetic, and subjective drift through the details of everyday travel-life, in contrast with the \u201ccritical nomad\u201d who, Meyer contends, frames the nomadic drift in historical contexts, institutional critique, and frameworks of movement. Notwithstanding these critical distinctions and the uncertainty of how global movement may be disrupted longer term by Covid-19 and related economic downturns, we understand from Meyer that the practice of the artist-nomad is at root engaged with the act of travel (10). While Rodr\u00edguez presents the position of a translocal artist as a critical engagement with the politics<\/em> of geography and representation, Meyer\u2019s definition of the artist-nomad even in its critical approach, is located in the physical mobility of the body of the artist. As Miwon Kwon identifies, a state of constant travel has emerged as an indicator\u2014if not the key marker\u2014of art-career success (46). From the limited sphere of the global or cosmopolitan art-world circuit and the position of the mobile artist, it can be easy to forget that most of the world\u2019s geography remains in the art-world margins, and for most of the world\u2019s population movement remains restricted anyway, whether by nationality or by economics. The identity and cultural capital afforded to the itinerant international artist-nomad (and the academic-star traveller could also be included here), is only available to the kinetically elite with the credentials to move and\/or the personal\/cultural circumstances to support movement beyond positions of marginality.<\/p>\n

Translocality, as a counternarrative, positions connectivity, dialogue, the struggle to understand language and cultural difference, and engagement with the conditions and situations on the ground as essential and integral ingredients. It is a position that acknowledges that mobility is restricted or frictioned\u2014or undertaken without choice as the result of economic migrancy\u2014for much of the global population, and stands in opposition to the homogenization and globalization of culture. Wojtowicz\u2019s reference to situatedness\u2014noted earlier\u2014is important, as once again we see the inherent double meaning of situation: between geographic locale, and point of view with reference to feminist standpoint theory and situated knowledge. To position oneself as a translocal artist is to place oneself in networks of formation and situated points of view, and the flow of communication inherent in dialogues: between self and other, between communities, between perspectives, between local and global concerns, between the social and the technical, and between the geographic and the cultural.<\/p>\n