Trans-Siberia and Back Again: Capturing the Moving Mind

“Capturing the Moving Mind/Management and Movement in the Age of Permanently Temporary War" was a conference on the Trans-Siberian train through Russia and China, September 11-20, 2005, organized and supported by the online journal ephemera: theory and politics in organization.

Map of the Trans-Siberians railway journey. From ephemera web magazine. Click map for larger image

The Trans-Siberian journey “Capturing the Moving Mind/Management and Movement in the Age of Permanently Temporary War” brought together 40 selected artists, activists, mathematicians, economists, sociologists and musicians on a ten-day train ride from Moscow to Novosibirsk (the largest city in Siberia) to Beijing. The project was an experiment in cohabitating in a spatially altered “moving” environment, passing from West to East across a magnificent landscape as the group discussed the state of our violently temporal world. Among the 40 artists aboard the trans-Siberian train were Gwylène Gallimard and Jean-Marie Mauclet, two community-based artists living in Charleston, S.C. They brought with them their current project, called "The Future Is on the Table," which is based in communities all around the world. They were interviewed about the journey for this article.

Bringing together a miscellany of “moving minds” aboard a transcontinental train, “Capturing the Moving Mind” was both exquisitely conceptual and manifestly physical, spatial, geographical; both a conceptual model and an actual train ride. This duality – between theoretical constructs and actual bodies moving through actual space – befits ephemera, the primary sponsor. ephemera is an online journal subtitled theory & politics in organization.

ephemera, the Web magazine, is devoted to the study of organizations, social and political, tangible and intangible. ephemera articles vary in their approach, but in some way concern how and why people are shepherded together, for what purposes, and the dominant forces of control. A key theme of recent issues has been that organization has moved beyond the physical office and factory model. Society itself is a gigantic, factory-like conundrum, albeit the assembly lines are often psychological. The 19th Century concept of the labor force as a physical body has been supplanted by a conceptual labor force that is indistinguishable from everyday reality. An ephemera collective member, Akseli Virtanen, states in an ephemera article, "The labor force has rather increasingly become detached from its spatial, physical and biological aspects and has become a mental category.The generic human capacities – intellect, perception and linguistic-relational abilities – which make human beings human have replaced machinery and direct labor in the core of value creation.”

Capitalism is more than an economic rationale; it is a psychological space, a subliminal pedagogy. The culture of capitalism is media-frenzied, and its primary objective is to influence, provoke or abuse the mind. The distractions of the media preoccupy us in the same way as, in the industrial age, hands and minds were linked to the conveyer belts. We are like responsive laborers in a production plant without walls. As the ephemera call for proposals put it: The new forms of control operate

on the possibilities of life in general. Unlike the modern logic of power, which always needs an institutional context and a normal state to justify itself, the new form of control avoids committing itself to any particular institution and its particular task. It rather seeks legitimacy from public opinion and the ethically right: ethics and obscure ‘public opinion’ replace formal law and its institutions as the basis for legitimacy.

A view from the train taken by the conductor, part of English artist Elly Clarke's Trans-Siberian Photo Project done during "Capturing the Moving Mind." From ephemera Web magazine

“Movement” is a principal theme of the ephemera Web magazine – both movement as a representation of the forces of market capitalism, and movement as a form of resistance. We are bombarded by external stimuli that cripple our strength for internal, individualistic responses. This general state of "false consciousness” blurs our psychologies together, but robs us of the resources we will need for collective action. The labor force has lost much of its primary power as a mass physical body; however, movement remains. The conflict between streamlined, structured movement and free movement – being spontaneous, innovative, or as arbitrary as making the unscheduled and unprompted decision to walk across the room – remains a source of unresolved tension. This tension produces a state of being ephemera articles coin “permanently temporary war.”

Just a train ride? No – an art project, an experiment in group dynamics, a political gesture and an intellectual forum underpinned by a history of ideas. “Capturing the Moving Mind/Management and Movement in the Age of Permanently Temporary War” manifested ideas that had percolated on the Web site. Like the first scientist to test Einstein’s Theory of Relativity by putting a clock in a jet airplane, “Capturing the Moving Mind” tested the premise that movement across an unfamiliar terrain, in a highly charged, spontaneous and intellectual atmosphere might result in new forms of living, new ways of viewing the world, new forms of politics.

In Irkutsk train station with "The Future is on the Table" (Jean-Marie Mauclet second from right). Photo by Gwylène Gallimard

Installation artist Gwylène Gallimard and her collaborator, sculptor and furniture maker Jean-Marie Mauclet are French-born immigrants who have lived in Charleston since the early '80s, where they opened and still today operate a café, Fast and French, which they describe as “an experiment in combining the American concept of fast food with the culture of French cuisine.” Professional restaurateurs, they are also artists who over the past two decades have pursued projects individually, as a team, and as members of Alternate ROOTS, a southeastern arts organization. Several of their previous projects have been collaborations with communities – schools, a homeless shelter, a public housing complex, an organization for the assistance of refugees. They applied to participate in the Trans-Siberian journey with their project, The Future is on the Table.

The Future is on the Table is possibly Gallimard/Mauclet’s most ambitious project to date, a study of the possible connection between individuals and cultures in the global network. The artists began by manufacturing 57 three-legged stools. The stools were cut out of a sheet of marine plywood on which a map of the world had been projected and painted. Each stool depicted a fragment of a 57-piece world map; the whole recreated the global village. The map they used was a flat projection of the world with the North Pole occupying the center.

Then the artists dispersed the stools, via an unconventional trade agreement, with the aspiration of making connections "around the topics like water, shelter and other burning issues of basic social justice … we sent bundles of them to groups around the world as presents. Recipients are to respond their own way. We intend to bring the stools back together at some point and shape a puzzle with whatever they have generated. A gift-exchange story?"

Stool #12, one of 57 three-legged stools Gallimard and Mauclet made for The Future Is on the Table. Photo by Gwylène Gallimard

The gift exchange story, which is still in development, began three years ago with a proposal issued via the Internet and postcards mailed en masse. Gallimard/Mauclet were looking to

DISPATCH THE STOOLS throughout the world, to invite participants to imagine, plan, map, build, perform, propose … that is PUT WATER and SHELTER ON, IN, ABOVE, WITHIN THE TABLE, and then to PIECE BACK together the PUZZLE of the stools along with NEW table to be set – cloth included – and invite friends to think and act further.

They would barter the stools in bundles of five or six with other artists or communities. Thus, the artists cemented “a deal.” Artists who accepted obligated themselves to in turn create projects in some way responsive to the concepts of water, shelter and a virtual discussion table.

The offer was simple, but conceptually The Future is on the Table was the result of lengthy deliberations on the state of the world as impacted by globalization. Global corporatization standardizes objects of exchange. The Future is on the Table hopes to counter with an apologia for diversity – by promoting a link between cultures sans standardization. The gift/barter/exchange at the heart of the project emphasizes the handmade, physical, tangible and craft-made objects. The 57 stools are "gifts” less in the modern sense (in which a gift is free) than in the spirit of ancient cultures. Gifts in ancient societies carried weight and significance as an essential aspect of human relations. Gifts established bonds of respect and a gift demanded a gift in return. However, they were not commodities. The gifts were not standardized and mass-produced; they carried the trace of the spirit of the giver. The Future is on the Table is an experiment in creating a liberal, postmodern community – based neither upon the concept of living close together (no longer necessary in the global world) nor upon convenience and the thrust to crush and eradicate differences.

Participation in The Future Is on the Table is worldwide: Above is Gallimard with an Arpan Collective member, Sugandha Tukaram Hode, in India during a 2005 Table workshop. Photo: Still from film by Michèle Waquant

Over the past few years Gallimard/Mauclet have traveled to various countries, places and sites overseeing The Future is on the Table projects, strategizing, facilitating, but playing the role, as Gwylène Gallimard puts it. “less of an administrator than of a shaman.”

• In France, several artists are creating a “Table of Ice” performance where the Doubs River becomes the border of Switzerland. Many generations from both countries made a plan to meet when the Doubs was frozen and became a gigantic skating rink.
• In Mumbai, India, thanks to MarketPlace Handwork of India, the Arpan (meaning to Dedicate or Offer Oneself), an artisan women’s cooperative, are asserting their right to live independently and send their daughters to schools. They are using The Future is on the Table as a platform to review their festivals, their mission, how they need to change and to understand other customs and traditions of the world.
• In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Nigerian artist/educator Marcia Kure is developing pictures using the burqua as a metaphor for shelter. To sum up her project she borrows from the song “War” by Bob Marley and the Wailers.
• In Capetown, South Africa, Phinias Chirubvu, a sculptor/educator, involves jobless youth and other artists in the trade of sculpture. The Future is on the Table project is their link to the art world.
• In London, England, Rajni Shah reenacted something that, in a way, started the whole project. She offered the stools to different people at the occasion of a dance event, and is now planning a Web table of The Future is on the Table participants.

Gwylène Gallimard and Jean-Marie Mauclet boarded the trans-Siberian train knowing that “Capturing the Moving Mind/ Management and Movement in the Age of Permanently Temporary War” and The Future is on the Table shared natural affinities. Both projects address the influence of globalization; both worry over the dominance of world capitalism. Both see capitalism as an incomprehensible blizzard of movement; both worry that world capitalism risks the preemptive cessation of all movement. Both take the theme of movement – a massive, unwieldy concept – and attempt to scale this weighty abstraction down to a human level of comprehension, meaning and significance. This being so, Gallimard/ Mauclet were simultaneously venturing in new territory, consorting with like minds and taking The Future is on the Table to its next step. Gallimard remembers, “When I saw the ephemera proposal, the first word that stuck in my mind was ‘movement.’ It spoke to me. I knew we would apply to take The Future is on the Table on the journey from the moment I read the phrase 'Capturing the Moving Mind.'”

Because of visa problems, Gallimard and Mauclet were two days late joining the trans-Siberian train, missing the take-off in Moscow. When they boarded, they met a swirl of conversations, monologues, dialogues, personalities, projects, visions, all this in addition to the glory of an unfamiliar landscape, passing by, its transience, its beauty. The landscape was a continual enchantment, an inspiration and, ironically, a continual source of distraction from the people and projects they shared this intimate space with.

In the train. Photo by Gwylène Gallimard

The physical layout of the space was freighted with its own difficulties. For “Capturing the Moving Mind,” organizers reserved two-and-a-half cars aboard a large train; participants shared sleepers. The cafeteria was the only space large enough to accommodate a majority of the participants simultaneously – and it was often either closed or being used as a cafeteria. The conference/art project included lengthy stop-overs at major destination points, such as Novosibirsk and Beijing, where organizers sponsored formal discussions, led by representative from local universities. However, Jean-Marie Mauclet remembers, “It wasn’t possible on the train for more than four or five of us to mingle at one time. What happened was that people often sat around talking, describing things that had gone on elsewhere. You had this sense that all sorts of things were happening.”

Despite the diversity of artistic interests and approaches, Gwylène Gallimard was struck by the absence of ethnic and nationalistic diversity among the participants. Even a recent article on the ephemera Web site makes note of this drawback, with reproachful witticisms. Brett Neilson writes in a posted review of the conference, “It would be easy to criticize an undertaking like this: a pack of intellectuals, activists, and artists, predominantly white and English speaking, speeding past impoverished towns, disputing the finer points of immaterial labor … To be sure, the paradoxes of the situation were sharpened as the train continued on its arrogant line … ” Gallimard comments:

It was not my idea of an international crowd. It was a Northern European crowd, and a world dominated by countries that speak English as a first or second language. The group was so different from Charleston – where we have white and black people around us. I didn’t expect that beforehand. The call for participants was an international call. And in my mind when you say international I think, firstly, of Chinese people as the majority of people in the world. There was no one there from South America, only one Asian. No people from India or Africa. And no Russian, Mongolian or Chinese from mainland China in the “Capturing the Moving Mind” train.

The two artists also sensed a tension between the participants with rigorously analytic and academic backgrounds, and participants whose modes of perception were rooted in their artistic practice. “It was difficult for some of us…. This feeling that every word had to be defined, and contextualized before we were allowed to use it.”

A temporary Table. Photo by Gwylène Gallimard

Problems similar to these occur in most conferences, to some degree or another. However, for Gallimard, who identifies herself as a community-based artist, the most unexpected aspect of the ephemera project was the expressed attitude toward the word “community”: “We explicitly did not want to create a community, or have a common cause. Rather we wanted to experiment with those who don’t have and don’t need one. We wanted to create with our hands and bodies something new” reads a paper published in the aftermath of the conference.

We gathered a group of researchers, philosophers, activists, artists and others interested in changes going on in society and engaged in changing the society as their own moving image, an image in time. In this experiment everybody was 'alone together' each one taking care of her/himself at the same time participating in the band, sometimes in the centre, again finding her/himself at the edge, like a pack of wolves around a fire with neighbors to the left and right, holding on by just a hand or a foot…

Furthermore, a printout exhorted participants prior to the take-off :

Please do not expect to sit at a table that is served; to arrive to a setup already set up. There will be nobody taking care of you, nobody checking in on you, the train just leaves. We will all be there ‘alone together’ or ‘within oneself with others’ at the same time yet differentiated. We recognize this as a schizoid position; being on the periphery, holding on by a hand or a foot… Welcome to movement.

The logic requires attention. On one hand, any group of individuals who have answered an academic proposal expressing particular ideas about contemporary society, who are themselves in at least partial agreement with those ideas, share a sympathetic relationship, enough so that they could be considered a loosely knit community. These same individuals, moreover, will be sharing lodgings for a little over a week, a state of being that will require indulgences. A community is not necessarily a homogenous unit; communities are usually full of discord, conflict and confusion. The participants may be “like a pack of wolves,” but wolf packs come together for a reason, which is to increase the food supply. Packs of wolves rely upon each other to ensure their physical self-preservation. It is not unthinkable that a group of artists and intellectuals might find the same positive value in community -- not the value of universal agreement, nor social relations, nor shared principals, only that by exchanging sympathetic ideas they insure their own intellectual self-preservation.

In Beijing train station. Photo by Gwylène Gallimard

The hostility to the word "community" seems to be that in a certain sense it clashes with the aspirations of the ephemera project, a leap into the unknown via movement – movement as a metaphor for sudden propulsion into a realm of groundless experience, lacking a definite plan, agenda, or purpose. Community implies constraints and obligations. On a practical level, perhaps social units must come with constraints, but the intention was to test this truism, not accept it a priori. “Capturing the Moving Mind” organizers preferred “multitude” as a description to “community.” A multitude is a blank canvas, an amorphous mass, a starting point. To say “community” risks implying a particular outcome for the project before the project has begun. It would risk pressuring participants to define an agenda rather than pushing the limits of a philosophical enterprise. It implies expectations. Too great an emphasis on a community experience, social values or shared political ideologies, any of the aforesaid using the language that we customarily employ to understand such concepts risks curtailing the authenticity of what might emerge – new ways of being, new forms of political thought. The experience of disorientation aboard the Trans-Siberian train was, in theory, a confrontation with infinite possibility.

“It was an existential experience,” remembers Jean-Marie Mauclet.

There is no sense of achievement. Except what you went through. You cannot say I learned this, or I learned that. Literally, you are in a moving direction and if you can stay with it you will learn so much. Without trying that hard, actually. There is not much resistance. It’s a state of mind. It’s like a Buddhist state of mind. You’re there, and your references shift.

Both Mauclet and Gallimard found meaning in the experience. Gallimard expressed how the journey left her with a new appreciation of the influence of media on everyday life as well as on discourse. Most of the projects aboard the train relied upon photography, film, video, radio or the Internet, or referenced the contemporary culture of sensory overload. “I saw how powerful new media art is; how the mind and the body thrive differently there and now; how new media change permanently the precepts of communication,” Gallimard comments.

We don’t know what will come out of "Capturing the Moving Mind” for everyone who was there. We don’t know what they will do in the future, or how this will influence them. It was a temporary experience. Everybody owns the new limits. You may experience a strong desire to explore them, or you may have a stronger reaction when you go back to your former situation, return to familiar audiences and the work you did before.

In the following interview Gallimard and I attempted to discuss community-based art, vis-à-vis “Capturing the Moving Mind.”

GG stands for Gwylène Gallimard. DLW stands for Darryl Lorenzo Wellington

DLW: You said how popular new media arts were on the Trans-Siberian train. You’re right – this is a phenomenon among young people in general. Your own work involves some new media, but tends to emphasize craftwork. The Future is on the Table, for example, is partially about the beauty of the handmade, the hand-crafted – things that preserve a human touch that you might not find in video and digital images. Do you think community-based art is adaptable to the new media aesthetic?

In Beijing. Photo by Gwylène Gallimard

GG: I think it is important to understand that the power of the media is transforming the way we relate to reality. But there are many different answers to your question. Very often, when people are offered drawing as a tool, they will respond awkwardly: “I’m not an artist. I can’t draw.” But if offered a portable camera it is welcomed instantly. On the other hand, when I did a project with homeless people at a crisis shelter I discovered that the reaction to taking a photograph was very different than to asking to stop and spend an hour with them and do a drawing. Taking the time to do a drawing transforms the relationship between two human beings where using any camera frames you as an outsider who is controlling the message. If you have a pencil in your hand, you make yourself welcome on a more intimate level. The problem is in trying to give the pencil to others.

DLW: Are you saying community-based art is really about working with people?

GG: Community-based art for me is working with people, their culture and their institutions. It is also working with my culture, my art history and my social commitments, questioning all of them. That is what I am really interested in. Yes, community based art is absolutely adaptable to the new media aesthetic. As we saw, there may be fewer limits for the community to share the tools of the trade when they are camera or video instruments. Budget remains a problem though.

But no matter what tools you use, community-based art is also about building a common ground, temporary or not. You cannot do anything before building a little common ground. Learning something about the local media builds a common ground. As an artist constantly running for time I do not appreciate what it is like to watch TV everyday, or have a television as a constant background noise at home. But I can work with people’s knowledge of that media to build a common ground.

Finally community-based art is also about ownership of the aftermath of the project. And this is a huge question, which spans its rhizomes in philosophy as well as economy and history, and needs to be addressed each time. In movement.

DLW: Do you care more about success in working with a community or about the art piece that results?

Phinias Chirubvu and his students, partners in The Future Is on the Table in Capetown, South Africa. Photo taken by a member of the group with a disposable camera sent them by Gallimard and Mauclet as part of the exchange

GG: First, there is not always an art piece result! The projects from “Capturing the Moving Mind” that are growing in my memory are the ones that have started a process. I care about developing a process in which art is a tool for possibilities – placing the arts in a relationship with people and communities different from the one they had before the project began. For a project to be successful it has to be successful both for the artist and the community. That does not mean that both successes will answer the same criteria. When I enter a project I enter with the idea that it will be successful. That doesn’t mean that everything will work as well as I hoped or the way I expected, but every part of the experience will bring something to the whole, and every aspect may produce the seeds of something better. I work with people the same way I work with collage. I try to make sure that everything of importance, everything someone intensely feels, reacts to, or spends a lot of time doing will fit into the net of the project and the possible outcomes. “My” community-based art involves first a good ear, and later a good view.

For me community-based art is also experiencing a fair exchange, a fair trade. I look forward to create an environment where people will learn from each other and generate "something" yet unknown. And I won’t quit before. One of the art pieces may be acting as a final period!

DLW: Finally, do you have any final thoughts on the word “community”?

GG: The word community is really defined by the way it is and has been used in the local or national language and its history. For instance, in England, I understand that “Community Theater” has a special meaning, almost defining a particular aesthetic. It’s like the word “avant-garde”; it can have many different meanings, and they change or grow stale pretty fast. However, if we talk about a global world, what’s important to remember is that a community is not a wall, a prison. It is not an absolute. We belong to communities mostly because of shared qualities. All of us belong to many communities. We may need to fight against the development of communities, which reinforce our propensity to profiling, things like gated communities. To Jean-Marie and I, community-based art mostly involves the creation of temporary communities in a very positive movement, maybe where we "capture our moving mind."

Paris Airport: the art project in transit. Photo by Gwylène Gallimard

Addendum by Gwylène Gallimard

The particular challenges of a trip like THE MOVING MIND had also to do with luggage: we cannot carry a studio around, so there are limits to the volume and weight imposed by such a travel. Our solution was to build a box and fill it with tricks!

• The BOX is made of thin marine plywood (for strength and weight), size 36 H x 19 W x 9 D, mounted on wheels, covered with a FUTURE IS ON THE TABLE poster.
• The TRICKS are:
• (1)  A table made of corrugated cardboard, epoxied (for stiffness), and foldable as the bellows of an accordion. TWO BELLOWS, one (dark) sky blue, the other earth color. Unfolded, said bellows are asymmetrical, stand at different angles and height, and can be used either as supports for two, separate, smaller tables or as “legs” for a larger table-like structure.
• (2)  A TABLETOP, of cardboard as well. Epoxied white, imprinted with a painterly rendition of the itinerary, from Moscow to Beijing, all train stops spelled out. In the shape of a half slice of Gouda cheese! Hinged so as to fold and fit in the box.
• (3)  A TABLECLOTH made of bits of fancy, old, handmade lace. May be used as tablecloth for the large table or, when bunched up, as top for one of the small tables, or any other way depending on the performance.
• (4)  A set of miniature, antique silver SPOONS, to evoke a formal table set.
• (5)  A series of six mounted PICTURES, as large as the box can take, representing the participation of the international artists and groups in THE FUTURE IS ON THE TABLE #3 and CDs and TAPES from all.
• (6)  Life-size pictures of three of the STOOLS we have sent to above-mentioned participants to our project. Pictures because, for sure, the real stools would not have fit in the box. Briefly, the stools were sent as introductory presents to start a conversation on globalization, focused on water and shelter as basic universal rights. Each stool is a piece of a puzzle representing the world. At the end of the project, when all the stools are back together, somewhere, our map of the world will be whole again. Along with all the projects generated in the process. A new temporary map,
• (7)  A set of TWO SCROLLS, hundreds of feet long. Both hand painted. ONE, in color, contains questions and thoughts proposed by Charlestonians where we live, about the MOVING MIND, the cities visited, the cultures encountered, the folks met during the trip. As if we were ambassadors for our friends left behind. THE OTHER, in various shades of grey, was added in November. It bears some answers to said questions. Plus facts, figures and new questions about the MOVING MIND, as a trip, as a human experience, as a learning/unlearning process.
• (8)  MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS like Scotch tape, paint, brushes, clips. You name it; we may have it in our box full of tricks.

And the box we carried from Charleston to Beijing and back is ready for other destinations, its content growing in the process. There was to be a performance “of the box” on the train platform in Moscow. But we missed the train! We flew to Novosibirsk to catch up! But it was too late for performing. The conference was in its Production Mode. No more Exploration.

A temporary Table in the train. Photo by Gwylène Gallimard

From trading our The Future is on the Table bumper sticker, we have received so far a book on accounting, a loaf of bread, a few photographs, a CD, a tape, a filming, a wonderful proposal and many thanks.

For more information on “Capturing the Moving Mind” and some of the participants of “The Future is on the Table #3”, see:
ephemera Web magazine
Fast and French (Gallimard & Mauclet)
Rajni Shah web site
Marketplace India

You may also e-mail to:
Gwylène Gallimard and Jean-Marie Mauclet
Phinias Chirubvu
Delphine Ziegler
Marcia Kure
Rajni Shah

Would you like to participate in “The Future is on the Table #3” and receive the last stools available? The deal is still on. Shipping and handling charges are on us. E-mail us at: jemagwga@knology.net

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is a poet, playwright and critic living in Charleston, S.C.

NOTES

“Capturing the Moving Mind” was organized and supported by ephemera: theory and politics in organization, Conflitti Globali, Megafoni, Tutkijaliitto, The Wihuri Foundation, the Foundation of Economic Education in Finland, Helsinki School of Economics, Chydenius Institute, University of Essex, m-cult centre for new media culture, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Novosibirsk State University and Tsinghua University.

All the references in this article are from documents posted online in ephemera

ephemera: theory & politics in organization is an online electronic forum, "the free journal for the discussion of theoretical and political perspectives on all aspects of organization." Produced by an editorial collective based in the U.K.

"Web of Capturing the Moving Mind," Akseli Virtanen and Steffen Böhm, eds., is an issue of ephemera (volume 5, volume 5, number X December 2005), It is an extra issue published in cooperation with Framework: The Finnish Art Review. It includes two dozen articles relevant to the "Moving Mind" conference; downloadable from the ephemera Web site.

Brett Neilson, "A Window on the World." This review of the "Capturing the Moving Minds" conference was published in the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto on 2 October 2005. The Italian version is available here. It is available in English on the ephemera Web site.

Original CAN/API publication: March 2006