The places in my archive are not interchangeable backdrops. They are working conditions, relationships and sources of pressure that keep changing the practice.
A place changes the work before the work begins
I have travelled through many places, but I do not want to turn that experience into a collection of location tags. A place matters when it changes the decisions, the materials, the people around the work or the reason for making it.
Berlin gave me walls, rooms, nights and a public art context. New York gave me scale, pressure and a long working history. Da Nang gave me objects, flash drawings, shared walls and a different rhythm of exchange. Anceu asked me to answer to a village. Johannesburg showed me culture as something built actively through music, murals, meals and rooms.
The work is not a souvenir
The point of documenting travel is not to prove that I have been somewhere. It is to keep the relationships and conditions around the work visible. A mural should not erase the wall. A portrait should not turn a person into scenery. A drawing should not pretend the place was only there to provide an image.
That is why the archive keeps process, people, objects, finished work and practical conditions together. The place remains part of the record instead of being consumed as a mood.
A route through the archive
Start with Berlin if you want to see the practice in public: Teufelsberg, street work, DA SWAMP, THE FLOOR and the live sessions. Move to Da Nang to see how a residency can change a visual vocabulary through flash sheets, murals and shared walls.
Go to Anceu for the question of scale and responsibility in a village. Go to New York for the longer history of education, work, fashion, culture and ambition. Then return to the individual project records, where each place becomes specific again.
What I bring back
I bring back images, but images are not the only thing that stays. I bring back a changed sense of what a room can hold, what a public mark can ask of people and how a practice can remain coherent while moving between cities and materials.
These guides are an invitation into that wider map. They are not travel advice. They are records of where the work has been tested, interrupted and given another direction.
Credits
- Original Sketchy Shona editorial field note connecting confirmed place-based records across the archive.