Bernauer Strasse U-Bahn, Berlin

I arrived in Berlin at the beginning of April for the first stint of two month-long trips.  I’m staying in a small but nice flat along a quiet street, situated between Mitte (city centre) and Prenzlauer Berg (trendy 19th century apartment buildings). I have a pleasant walk to work and enjoy varying my route, exploring different streets and pathways. My travel pass is valid for a month and so I’ve also been trying to visit some of the tourist sites in my spare time.

The semester started on the week beginnging the 12 April and will run until mid-July. My plan is to stay here for the opening and then return towards the end. Unfortunately, up until just recently I have had trouble getting online which has been frustrating; I had hoped to provide more regular updates on my research but it just hasn’t been possible. The following posts are an attempt at ‘cathcing up’ and sharing some parts of the last few weeks.

Library card and key to the TML

I’m now two weeks into my stay in Montreal and am starting to find my feet. I know where to get my food and buy my ink cartridges, I have a key to the lab and a (provisional) library card. However, I’m still not too sure what I am doing in terms of methods, I have terrible internet connection (when I do have a connection, that is!) and it’s getting pretty cold. Fieldwork/fieldlife; modulations of intensity.

On that note, Joe and I have just submitted a paper on precisely this sort of theme to the journal ‘Performance Research‘, following their call for contributions on ‘Fieldworks’. Here’s the outline of our proposal:

As geographers we are often recognised by our commitment to fieldwork and it is arguably one of the discipline’s motifs. Yet despite the intimacy between geographers and fieldwork, the actual doing of fieldwork remains a black-box; particularly for students who, whilst well-drilled in ethics and risk-awareness protocol, can be unfamiliar with the messy yet productive encounters that fieldwork can afford. Therefore we propose to write a short, performative piece which traces some of the small stories from our respective Masters research. One story narrates the ethnography of glaciological research in Sweden, whilst the other illustrates the ethnography of a participatory mapping group in Colombia. The aim here is the animation of the frenetic rhythms of fieldwork, or as we call it, fieldlife; the contention that the space-times of research are not compartmentalised into desk/field or work/play binaries, but are contingent, overlapping and unfolding encounters; events which can, and should be, deployed productively rather than omitted, from an on-going ‘writing-up’ process. We think that this paper intersects with both the performance-led and scholarly concerns of the proposed issue of Performance Research.

Avenue-Parc / Fairmount Avenue Intersection, Montreal

This weekend has been fairly quiet but I met up with Xin Wei to continue our discussion about the TML, in a lovely café called ‘Le Figaro‘, on Saturday. We had a really great conversation about his plans for the lab, his ideas about ‘thick experiments’ and also how to go about creating events where you can palpably encounter concepts. We swapped different readings that we liked and when I finally left and looked at the time, four hours had gone by!

The first week or so has been rather intense and so it’s been nice to have a long weekend (it’s Canadian Thanksgiving) so that I can recover. I’ve explored some of the surrounding area and played around on Google Map Street View, which has just launched! Good timing.

I don’t have a schedule for the forthcoming weeks but this is what’s lined up for tomorrow:

Please come join Thomas Jellis from Oxford for an introductory conversation about spaces of aesthetic experiment and ecologies of practice.

4:30 Tuesday October 13
TML EV7.725

Thomas Jellis is a DPhil student in the School of Geography at the University of Oxford.  His research focuses mainly on science and technology studies, philosophy and non-representational thought.   He’ll be a resident researcher at the TML till December.

Xin Wei
Please come for a chat, plus drinks afterward!

Papineau Metro, Montreal

It’s the end of my fourth day in Montreal and I’m writing this entry from my new ‘home’ for the next eight weeks or so, Papineau. It’s a fairly quiet part of the city, in the north-east, and is only a few stops from downtown. I’m staying in a flat (called a 2 1/2, although not entirely sure what this means) in what was once a 19th-century hotel. It’s dated but should do the job! I now have a monthly metro pass, food in the fridge and I’ve just about worked out how to cross a road at an intersection.

In terms of fieldwork, I have met up with Xin Wei, the director of the Topological Media Lab (TML), to discuss what I hope to do while I am here and what materials we might be able to generate together. It’s exciting to be here and meet  people whose work resonates with that I have been thinking about. Here’s my provisional schedule for the rest of the week: Harry Smoak has invited me along to his lecture tomorrow on the ‘Architecture that happens’ , there’s a reading group for a project on ‘Memory and Place’ on Thursday and then a two-week event combining music and Frankenstein (more details to follow!) will kick off on Friday. I’m also due to introduce my work to the lab tomorrow late afternoon…