In Transit

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This project was created during a 3-year period between 2016 and 2019 and elaborates on the repetitive occurrence of millions of bus journeys across London daily.

The bus network represents the city’s blood stream, a vital part of the life of millions of people. It is so fundamental that its existence becomes given, and the time spent with it unnoticed. Many of us rely on a daily commute on a specific route and the time spent with travel is utilised to serve other activities: some extend the office time; others use it to switch off with a book or a TV show watched on the phone or catching up with family and friends. Most times the essence of the journey remains hidden in the general bustle of life.

 

 

My purpose was to find a method to express this very core experience. I have been occupied with avant-garde and modernist courses such as Paul Klee and Mira Schendel and Klee’s sentiment on “taking the line for a walk” gave itself to be explored within the context of a bus ride. The drawing tool in the hand is placed against the surface of the paper to be directed by the movement of the vehicle in the fashion of a seismograph. This leaves a unique line drawing specific to the journey. The nature of the mark describes the circumstances of the event from road conditions to traffic; This visual language gives physical body to the ephemeral and density to the essence of travel.

These journeys were chosen in a random but consecutive manner, getting off the bus in one stop and getting on the next that arrives. This way of working created the opportunity for a larger, 3 dimensional linework to come to existence spanning across the map of London. The correspondence of the small images documenting each journey and the large linework concludes the relation of the part to the whole in the fashion of fractals.

 

“Games aren't constituted with a particular outcome. Games are constituted by the rules that are used ... It isn't whether it produces one sort of outcome, but how all these rules react to one another and how it defines a set of relationships. In that same way, I don't think of any object as being particularly significant. It's much more the system that generates it.” Kenneth Martin's work on chance and order.

 

The set of rules created for the project against the backdrop of the highly structured nature of TFL carve new meaning and invite the viewer to engage with the idea of bus journeys in a new light, contemplate on the nature of chance and play within this strict system.

The journey became more evident as a metaphor to a daily ritual, presence, spirituality.

How these daily experiences are obvious but overlooked and how their uniqueness is reflected in each drawing as much as each passenger and their experience is a unique event.

 

Alongside these, the bus itself inevitably becomes a main character in this play as a metaphor of a boat on wheels, diligently transporting people between destinations. The ship in the universe of Foucault is the perfect embodiment of a heterotopia, a place within a place, different, contradictory, other. The ship is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself while also being given over to the infinite sea, and that it travels from port to port, from tack to tack. The passengers give up personal freedoms to participate and money in exchange for provision that is very specific to this space, that brings special relationship and trust to the equation.

The drawings give the buses visibility in the metaphysical plane. I am only the facilitator for the line to appear on the paper while I am part of the wider social constellation that enables their existence in the first place.