Rocky Mobilities
Lynne Pearce, Co-Director, Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe)
The Rocky Futures live-video art exhibition – featuring the work of fourteen artists from three continents – took place on 26-28 October 2023 as part of the annual T2M [Transport, Travel and Mobility] conference. For the first time, T2M was co-hosted by two institutions – Konkuk University, South Korea and Lancaster University, UK – and their respective mobilities centres, the Academy of Mobility Humanities (AMH) and CeMoRe. For both T2M and CeMoRe, 2022-3 was a special year as both organisations celebrated their twentieth anniversaries. Indeed, for CeMoRe, the T2M conference was the culmination of a full of year of events marking the anniversary, including a memorable international colloquium (July 2023) at which mobilities scholars from Lancaster and around the world reflected on how the field has evolved – and become a global phenomenon – over the past twenty years.
One of the most exciting developments in recent times has been the rapid expansion of the new subfield, art mobilities — making the incorporation of the Rocky Futures exhibition into this celebratory conference especially timely. Jen Southern – co-curator of the exhibition – has been one of CeMoRe’s associate directors for over a decade and, alongside fellow-artist Kaya Barry, has played a leading role in showing how art and art practice can be incorporated into mobilities research and methodology. The launch of a dedicated Art Mobilities JISC-Mail Global List in 2019, has played an important role in establishing this global network of artists and scholars, while the recent co-authored publication – ‘An Agenda for Creative Practice in the New Mobilities Paradigm’ (Barry, Southern et al, Mobilities, 18 (3), 2023) – is an inspiring manifesto for all those seeking to take the field forward.
The remit for the Rocky Futures exhibition builds upon the related Rocky Climates project developed by Rebecca Birch, Sarah Casey and Southern since 2020. Rocky Climates was inspired by the simple, but powerful, proposition that even as geology has much to tell us about the earth’s climatic past so, too, can it put us in conversation with its future. By attending closely to rocky landscapes – and their human and more-than-human interactions – so can we begin to feel our way towards what it might mean for planetary life to co-exist in a more sustainable way.
Working across multiple time-zones, delivering the live-video performances to conference participants was inevitably a challenge, and meant that some sessions were screened very early in the morning – or in the middle of the night- to conference participants in Lancaster and Seoul. Because of this, archiving the exhibition and linking to the Cemore website, was always part of our plans, and it is wonderful to see how well the vibrancy and immediacy the live-events has been captured. Without question, Rocky Futures was the best possible way to bring CeMoRe’s twentieth-anniversary celebrations to a close; not only does the exhibition speak to CeMoRe’s own prioritising of the climate emergency over the past five years but also the way in which mobilities research continues to renew itself.
Lynne Pearce, CeMoRe Co-Director (Humanities)
T2M 2023 Conference Organiser (Lancaster)