Featured image: Street (he)art in the centre of Porto. By nature. Photo by Kim.

Now that the website is properly launched 🎉, I wanted to leave this note…

Mobile Worlds is about connecting arts, research, people, and nature, to see what might emerge if we challenge how we think about what “is done”, and what “is not done” (i.e. cultural patterns).

Seeking that connection will take many shapes, and will require collaboration with and between many people, and if I may allow myself this eccentricity, also with many more-than-humans. Mobile Worlds is working under the hypotheses that:

1. Nearly everyone has some form of a “third culture” within them, emerging through formative contact with cultures outside a given single one we may have been “socialised” into (sorry about the complex words there…to be clarified and developed for Mobile Worlds!). “Third cultures” are those cultures that are their own amalgamation of diverse cultures, rather than a given defined culture such as a nationality-based one, or a regional one.
2. Connecting with our “third cultures” has the potential to come up with ideas that challenge the status quo, perhaps even in ways that a given current society in which we are embedded has not yet envisioned. Such ideas could be about anything, but we are starting with the topic of sustainable mobility.
3. Connecting with “third cultures” is easier with the help of arts (i.e. making something – drawing, photography, poetry, sculptures, you name it) than through speech (alone).
4. Connecting with “third cultures” is easier together than alone.
5. Connecting with “third cultures” is easier if it engages with space, movement, and nature than in a single, human-made room.

Any thoughts on this are very welcome! There’s existing literature (academic and not), movies, songs, paintings, sceneries… and many other sources that we’re aware of (and many more we still need to become aware of), and we’ll be exploring that more over time. If you have suggestions or recommendations please comment or send an email any time! There may also be opportunities for collaboration of some kind.