Expat Population Worldwide Infographic | The Global Shed

Expat Population Worldwide Infographic | The Global Shed

Isaac Julien's Ten Thousand Waves

Isaac Julien, link to 2010 Guardian review

Just saw Isaac Julien's Ten Thousand Waves at the ICA Boston. Amazing. Attacking a topic like victims of globalization in a nuanced way that resonates and invites dialog.

The Searchers II

Sasha Bezzubov & Jessica Sucher
American Sikh with portrait of Guru
Gobind Singh, at an international Sikh
boarding school (Amritsar, India)
2006
40 x 50"

Wanderlust Encyclopedia Pictura

Wanderlust Encyclopedia Pictura

Holy nostalgia romantic sensibility for place...

Expat Explorer Survey

Expat Explorer Survey - world's largest expat survey from HSBC International

How To Create a Job | This American Life

How To Create a Job | This American Life

Attracted to jobs overseas, my muse, the female expatriate, is constantly chasing a rainbow. Although more on domestic job creation, this episode from This American Life spells out how jobs get shuffled from state to state. Fascinating overview of how priorities warp through carefully crafted lenses like reduced regulation and people are encouraged to move away from traditional support structures.

Horst Ademeit at Hamburger Bahnhof

Hamburger Bahnhof - Berlin: "HORST ADEMEIT"

I'm still haunted by this exhibition last week. I'm currently working on an exhibition called The Excess of Memory that goes hand and hand with an expat's tendency to live many lives and mix those memories. My occasional obsession with journal writing attempts to sort out people and places from past lives. Horst's incessant journals and photo-taking (8500 polaroids in the exhibition!) reminded me of this tendency...

Thoreau, Castles in the Air

If you have built castles in the air,
your work need not be lost;
that is where they should be.
Now put the foundations under them
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Lebbeus Woods

Leave it to bldgblog to always take me where I need to go.

As I'm wandering around Berlin, taking photos of architecture to take The Sherwin Series to the next stage, I learn about Lebbeus Wood's film treatment for Underground Berlin. Then I stumble on this quote from Woods which is exactly aligned with the behavior of the forms in my 2010 prints.

Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms. I am one of millions who do not fit in, who have no home, no family, no doctrine, no firm place to call my own, no known beginning or end, no "sacred and primordial site." I declare war on all icons and finalities, on all histories that would chain me with my own falseness, my own pitiful fears. I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength, then "melt into air." I am an architect, a constructor of worlds, a sensualist who worships the flesh, the melody, a silhouette against the darkening sky. I cannot know your name. Nor you can know mine. Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city.

Der Traum vom Fliegen - The Art of Flying

Der Traum vom Fliegen - The Art of Flying

4 March–8 May 2011

Opening:
3 March, 7 p.m

Haus der Kulturen der Welt
John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10
10557 Berlin, Germany

Rip Hopkins - Another Country

Rip Hopkins - Photography : Another Country

Expat interiors. Constant quest for something better.

BLDGBLOG: The Migration of Mel and Judith

BLDGBLOG: The Migration of Mel and Judith

Looks my tangled home fragments in a lamp. Brilliant.

Excerpt from bldgblog.blogspot.com. Always a good read:

Like the spaceships in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001, the walls of their representational frame simply turn and turn, bringing us over and over again back through the same space, as if unwilling to let go of what's come before...retired into this deliberately over-nostalgic world of their own making, constantly cycling back in memory through their shared past. They have built a frame to fit themselves within, as if to give their lives narrative completion.

Sometimes nest-building feels like this. It's fascinating to me when expats do this, even in temporary homes as Bachelard described the home—the I that separates from the non-I.

For this reason, I'm currently collecting photos of expat domestic spaces. If you have a moment, please email a photo of any part of your home overseas, particularly an interior room, to jdietrick@gmail.com Thanks!

Glenn Kaino

Nice quote from Glenn Kiano's 2010 LAXART show, In a world that is truly upside down, the true is a moment of the false.

Not at Home

Yesterday I made my first visit to the library Bauhaus Archive Berlin. Below is a list of expat related books encountered during my research into the importance of color in the manufacturing of consumer desire and political ideology in Cold War Berlin. I’m still fascinated by expatriates’ inclination towards nomadism. The following quote from Christopher Reed’s 1996 book Not at Home helps to clarify related history.

The notion of domesticity itself an invention of the modern age—the home, the family, privacy as comfort as opposed to the workplace—has been challenged and ridiculed by modern artists, architects and designers. From 1859, when Charles Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life casts the modern painter as a man of the crowd who curses the hours he must spend indoors asleep when he could be out recording ‘the landscapes of the great city,’ domesticity became the anti-thesis to modernity.

House in Berlin

A friend asked me to post this call, related to expats in Berlin. Please contact Michelle James if you are interested.

If you are currently looking for or have recently bought a home in Berlin, House Hunters International would like to put your story on TV!

The hit show is looking for energetic individuals, couples and families to share their story about moving abroad. Participating in our show is a lot of fun and a great way to document your exciting search for a home and new life abroad. Contributors should be fluent in English.

If you are interested in participating with the show or learning more, please send an email to househunterscasting@leopardfilms.com. Please include your contact information, the locations you are moving from and to, and a picture of your family and your property.

Looking forward to speaking witth you soon,

Michelle

Michelle James
Associate Producer
LEOPARD FILMS USA
127 East 26th Street, New York, NY 10010.
+1 212 843 2821
michelle.james@leopardfilms.com
www.leopardfilms.com

Expat Artists: The Creative Life Abroad � Expat Arts

Expat Artists: The Creative Life Abroad at Expat Arts

Another report on artists living overseas as we're about to spend a year in Berlin. Of course, there's a long history of this.

One example—Cy Twombly lives half his year in Lexington, Virigina and half in Rome, Italy and has done so for decades. I could totally do that. By the way, the Museum Brandhorst in Munich open May 2009. It has the most impressive Cy Twombly room I have seen, second to the the front room of the Cy Twombly Museum in Houston. Above is a picture that I took of the outside of the Museum last winter holiday break. Go visit!

Expat Early Returnees Survey

A professor in Canada just asked me to post this survey. Hopefully you'll have some time to help her out.

Expat Early Returnees – Please Help!

Have you and your family ever returned home early from an international assignment? Do you know someone else who has? Dr. Nina Cole, an Associate Professor from Ryerson University in Toronto is inviting early returnees to participate in her study of early returns from home from the perspective of the families involved. This information is critical in order to help reduce the often-painful circumstances behind early returns through better pre-assignment preparation. Please visit http://ninacole.net before June 30, 2010 and click on ‘Expat Questionnaire’ (short, anonymous and confidential). Questions can be directed to Dr. Cole at n2cole@ryerson.ca. Your participation would be very much appreciated.

Global Relocation Trends Just Released

Thanks for Andrea at expatwomen.com highlighting the latest trends in Brookfield's Annual Global Relocation Trends survey.

expatwomen.blogspot.com

Part Bicycle?

Anticipating our upcoming trip to Ireland packed with biking trips, our friend Sean Miller sent us this fantastic quote from Flann O'Brian's novel The Third Policeman, in which Sergeant Pluck addresses atomic theory in relation to bicycles:

The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles. They go on to discuss percentages: apparently the postman, due to the nature of his job which involves much bicycle-riding, is a full 71% bicycle. This also means that his bicycle is 71% human. When it gets to this stage, the bicycle will start sneaking inside to sit by the fire, and food will start disappearing. "If you let it go too far it will be the end of everything," says the Sergeant. "You would have bicycles wanting votes and they would get seats on the County Council."

Must look into whether expatriates exchange atoms with planes. Surely they do with each subsequent location.

Eva Hesse, Immortal Longings

Immortal longings ... an untitled piece of Eva Hesse's Studiowork (1968). Photograph: Abby Robinson/Courtesy of Fruitmarket gallery, Edinburgh

Important to bookmark for later reference. I had never seen this Eva Hesse piece. Exhibition in Edinburgh. Article in The Guardian at http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/aug/05/artist-eva-hesse