Sketch for a Nomad Cityscape, Hybrid Animation 6 minute loop. 2009

This hybrid animation, built from video segments of my garden and scanned and sampled images of nomadic dwellings, both contemporary and historical, sets up a series of contradictions; setting the garden- an image of home, as the ground for a living in motion and simultaneously becoming “city” and collapsing temporalities and scales to infer miscegenation of archaic and contemporary technologies inherent in the nomadic ideal.

 Making collage becomes a way of thinking about edges. It can point to what happens where things meet, and infer bodily presence at the seams.  Making art is a home that I  carry with me. I intend for my pictures to be promiscuous in that they can be simultaneously immersive and deconstructive. I want the animation to embody the kind of tactile event present in painting; referring to the (neo-romantic) notion of “landscape as event” as well as flatness in painting traditions from various Asian cultures to color field in the West.

This new body of work is informed by  Miwon Kwon and Rosie Braidotti, whose work on nomadic narratives helps to account for much of my past , and the social narratives around me, formerly in London and now in San Francisco. As a new mother, I find myself part of an eco-system in which I will need to remain in one place for long periods of time. This condition does not erase my nomadic desire, but shifts it towards the realms of ethics, fiction and vicarious travel. I think that this work, is in part a reflection of my attempt to understand the nomadic while staying in place.

Ranu Mukherjee 2009