[Spaces of] temporary permanence

[spaces of] temporary permanence [tp] is a cluster of artistic co-operation and research between scholars and artists from The Leeds School of Contemporary Art and Graphic Design, Leeds Metropolitan University and the Centre For Tourism & Cultural Change (CTCC), Leeds Metropolitan University, UK

Project Collaborators

Ana Andersson, Fabian Frenzel, Charlie Jeffery, Dan Robinson, Laura Robinson, Mike Robinson, Liz Stirling

Contact

Fabian Frenzel fab[at] in-no.org

Synopsis for the Cluster

A syndrome originally refers to phenomena that ‘run together’. The reason why they run together is not yet discovered and yet it seems obvious that they are associated. Forms of mobility, like tourism and migration, ‘run together’ yet in what ways are they connected?

Converging conceptually in the paradox of [tp] this proposal combines separate projects of individual contributors in a shared framework to interrogate the tourism migration syndrome. It remains open to further contributions.

[tp] reflects the tourist experience of liminal space where a moment of transience may end the temporal order of before and may enable the temporal order of thereafter. The moment opens up to permanence as time comes to an end. What are the obstacles we employ to interrupt the flow of time?

Tourists often seek [tp] to recreate and yet it is also a position of precarity, vulnerability and risk. Framed as adventure this seems to relate the tourist experience to that of unregulated migrants, however decisive differences exists as these moments are framed in differential legal and material structures.

Detention centres in Italy are called ‘Centri di Permanenza Temporanea’. Like their counterparts in the rest of Europe they function to integrate the transient and precarious experiences of [tp] into the legal, social-political and temporal order of European societies. Bordered by walls and barbed wired how successful are temporal structures in managing [tp]?

The projects in this proposal interrogate various material temporal structures, places like camps, tents and dens and obstacles like walls, barriers and frontiers. What is their role in producing [tp] and how are they transformed in differential uses? Reproducing temporal structures and research existing ones by way of photographic and narrative documentation are only some of the ways in which the projects will address these questions.