The Navigation Principle: Planetary 

Monday, March 6, 2017, 7pm

The Navigation Principle: Planetary

Doreen Mende

HEAD – GenèveBoulevard Helvétique 9, 1205 Geneva, seminar room CCC, salle 27, 2nd floor

Caption: Ill-pixelated Source from Arthur Holmes (1944, plate 48, F.N. Ashcroft, Gletsch). Image: CCC March 2017.
Caption: Ill-pixelated Source from Arthur Holmes (1944, plate 48, F.N. Ashcroft, Gletsch). Image: CCC March 2017.

The ancient art of navigation is a contemporary condition. Maybe it is our contemporary popular culture. What, ultimately, are today’s conditions and consequences of navigation? The talk will propose to enter that question through the notion of the planetary as an attempt to enounce the navigation principle. The term planetary provides some sort of a working tool and curatorial methodology to learn to understand more precisely the art of navigation as an inescapable condition to think with: It takes place while driving with the car’s GPS. Or while operating the endless image of a computer-game. We navigate while surfing across digital platforms using earth-energy. It takes place on ‘left-to-die-boats’ across the Central Mediterranean Sea in life-danger. As well as on the Lac Léman in class privilege. These navigations operate through lived experiences in non-linear time, as a network of practices crossing borders, as forms of embodiment or the inscription of the feminine, on unstable grounds and liquidity towards spatial disorientation, or through the entanglement of knowledge and non-knowledge. The talk takes place in conversation with the CCC Curatorial Seminar asking ‘what is navigation?’. In that seminar, we develop a vocabulary through text-activation, thought-movements, listening, image-processing and thinking in different languages. Its objective is to process and share a political/social/queer/sonic consciousness of ‘navigation’ as a possibility for learning to live the layered complexity of the contemporary world.