Philadelphia, 2006
With my blog http://mobilenarratives.blogspot.com I discovered again the pleasure of writing as an extension of an experience, as a way to think, to express feelings, to communicate. I started to write in English, a new language for me.
One year ago I couldn’t even write one sentence that made sense. It was a disaster, a frustration. Nevertheless, try to write in English, try to speak… This urge to communicate probably happened because I am here alone, detached from my language, my culture, my home, without the persons I used to know, the places I used to go, without the landscape, the ocean and the horizon (…)
Here in America, I have an ambiguous status, always in between. At the University, I’m not a student, I’m not a teacher either, I’m not a worker, I don’t have a social security number, I don’t belong here, I am an ‘exchange visitor’, I am an artist-in-residence, a foreigner, a stranger.
The idea to make a book appeared to me, first of all, as a way to put in paper texts and photos of my narratives in this foreign country: little stories, thoughts, daily life performances. The same way certain people make photo albums and diaries, drawings or collages, to keep the track of the days, to track the time passing by.
Through that I discovered the pleasure of creating everyday, on a daily basis. I began to write, take digital photos, post on the internet, anywhere people could read me. All my friends around the world.
Not just to work on long term projects anymore (which I do continue to do anyway), but to experiment a quotidian art, more related with life it self, more local, personal and intimate.
Re-reading the texts in my blog I understood they speak mostly about my choice of living abroad, my chosen exile, my searching for home. I understand that living displaced, is currently an experience of millions of people. Immigrants, war refugees, exiled people, all of them, all of us, trying to live a better life. In our mobile world, all kinds of migrations and exodus are important in understanding the time we live in. We could tell the narrative of the world through the perspective of migration fluxes.
But my goal here is not so ambitious. This is a simple book, very personal, fragmented, using different sources as my blog, stories, notes, photos, graphic design work… it follows more or less a chronological line, starting in January 2005, until now, the Summer of 2006. »
in Preface «Mobile Narratives»
by Cláudia Tomaz
