home is where the heart is, a continuing series of works

itinerant space: a journal of art, design and communication research practices, is an experimental online platform for doctoral researchers at RCA.

Editor-in-chief: Professor Teal Triggs
Founding editors: Nick Bell, Karen Bosy, Kirsty Smith
Issue editors: Nick Bell, Karen Bosy, Kam Rehal
Contact: itinerant.space@rca.ac.uk

itinerant space, School of Communication, Royal College of Art, Garden House, Dorando Close, London W12 7FN

Website design: Regular Practice.
Site development: Mads Kullberg

Contributor Biographies

Archive

Notes from the Editors
Karen Bosy, Nick Bell, Kirsty Smith and Teal Triggs

Communication research is emerging internationally as a robust interdisciplinary practice. We find ourselves up against a sense of urgency to address rapidly shifting socio-political-cultural-technological environments. Postgraduate, post-doctoral and early career researchers are playing a substantive role in leading research into, for, and through critical communication theories, methods, and practices. New knowledge emerges out of radical and often disruptive approaches, but can only be successful if underpinned by a sympathetic understanding of those we are working with. At the same time, we are seeing an increase in the importance of the ways communication research is informing, shaping, and challenging the precarity of change; and, with this, a questioning of the way in which communication research and practices are ‘made public’ and disseminated as conversation.

KS: Questioning the role of communication, democracy and diversity within academic publishing, our aim is to examine what these standards of communication symbolise, and query systems of publishing.

itinerant space sets out to explore, interrogate and critically reflect on communication research practices, and we begin with the contributions of School of Communication postgraduate researchers. The gestation period of the journal has been lengthy. We began the process in a pandemic-free world in 2019, and continued with the key conversations taking place during a period of lockdown and reliance on online platform technologies. The ongoing debate between the editorial team and the broader cohort of postgraduate researchers and external guests focussed on radically rethinking what communication publishing might mean. If we have learned anything, it is that a slow, generative process steeped in dialogue, and reflection, can lead to new ways of thinking and making.

KB: For me the keyword grammar of itinerant space can function as a diagram, an assemblage, supporting an ongoing process of interaction and iterative conversation.

NB: Ongoing dialogue can meander; it can be unruly and perhaps should not be packaged in the same way.

itinerant space is an ongoing project. Its very nature is developmental, continually transformed through an engagement with its readers. We invite you to join us as we move forward on our research journey.

home is where the heart is, a continuing series of works
Karen Bosy

Project overview —

My practice is within a tradition of documentary and experimental filmmaking. While experimental filmmaking encompasses narrative forms, my video and installation works complicate the notion of narrative found in documentary practice. The video screened here, home is where the heart is, is one of a series of video and photographic works that document my walking path through a section of wetland forest as spatial and material. In this section of forest, a duo of birch trees stands near the organised verticality of a utility pole. One duet partner takes a more errant position each time and in this sense the birch tree’s lowered head is suggestive of duration. In her analysis of space and the material landscape as space/time, cultural geographer Doreen Massey theorised space as made up of practices that are ‘necessarily embedded’ in material (2015, p. 9). In my video series I attend to ideological and material structures in terms of space/time and as frames in the landscape. My works put pressure on the frame(s) in accord with Structural Film’s enquiry into its own material practices and materialism in film (Rees, 2020).

References

Massey, Doreen B. (2005) For Space. London; Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE.

Rees, Alan L. (2020) Fields of View: Film, Art and Spectatorship. London New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Biography

When I was a child, my family moved from Toronto, a city in the middle of a continent to a rural island in the Caribbean Sea. Although I was young, this move away from extended family and a place I understood as my world, brought into view for me the constructedness of my reality. As James Lingwood explains: ‘we learn to interpret the conversations associated with photography, cinema, painting, street signs and so on,’ and our knowledge of these systems ’lead us to believe that the world is a fixed and orderly place’ (Lingwood quoted in Kester, Rachel Whitread’s House, 1995). Lingwood’s comment corresponds to an early impression of my new home where, mixed in with my astonishment at the clichéd truth of the velvety heat of the scented tropical air, was my awareness of the unfamiliar design of street lighting.

As a result of this move, my understanding of television also changed. What had been for me a remotely controlled, public form of entertainment became a tool for communication within the community. My mother’s informational puppet show, she was in public health then, was broadcast daily. The puppets could be found in the opening time slot on the sole TV channel of this island, broadcast during after school hours. In contrast with this experience of the image as a productive space, later my school selected me and other girls to play the pirates for a commercial promoting Birds Eye ready-made food for children, which was also broadcast in the UK. This experience highlighted for me the role of landscape within the potential of moving image.

Subsequently back in Toronto, I studied painting at OCA(DU) and then printmaking and painting at The Slade School of Fine Art. Currently I move between London and Toronto; my work is held at the Eagle Gallery. As a PhD candidate at RCA, I am considering the unfixed nature of site and conversations associated with media in the context of dispersal and critical-documentartist art practice. My main field of reference is experimental (structural) film. I use video, photography, graphite drawings and installation within my practice-based research. My paper on the subject of the monument in art practice and daydreaming is relevant here and can be found at https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/444. Links to my published writing can also be found on Instagram @kmbosy and my blog: www.kmbosy.com/blog.

Conversation: where critical friends of itinerant space are invited to comment on journal submissions as part of an ongoing research dialogue.