Landing – imaginative engagement

With its evocative title and material double-play, Hossein Valamanesh’s work of 1997, Longing/Belonging, is often described as articulating the artist’s own experience of migration from Iran to Australia in the 1970s and the concomitant negotiation between two cultures that this entailed. Installed in the space of the gallery, the work consists of two interconnected pieces: a Persian carpet whose central rondel has been charred, and a photograph showing the carpet, sited in a landscape in Northern Australia, with a fire burning on it. The photograph documents the past event, the aesthetic ritual that produced the work, while the presence of the charred carpet in the gallery powerfully returns the performance to the present, bridging the chasm between our physical encounter with the work of art, here and now, and the eloquent gestures that inscribed its surfaces, there and then. In a telling turn of phrase, Nikos Papastergiadis questioned the work: ‘Is

this an unhomely arrival or the coexistence of two types of landing in a strange landscape?’2 In Valamanesh’s work, there is not a singular location that is, forever or immutably, home, but rather, the record of an elemental act that has transformed the material trace of the past, remembered home within the present: an unhomely arrival, a home (be)coming. Albeit unwittingly, Papastergiadis’ question brings us directly to the figure of ‘landing’, the figure through which this chapter proceeds. In a simple sense, a landing is an architectural motif, the space at the top

of stairs or between flights that allows the climber to take a breath, select a course, and move on. Significantly, it implies a stage within a wider journey,

rather than an end in itself. This implication is sometimes obscured when landing is taken to be an arrival, a point of completion, the final destination obtained. That gesture fixes landing, and the one who lands, in a teleological relationship with time and space; it is landing as predestination, as a carefullylaid plan being brought to its final, determinate end. It is a sense of landing to which I do not subscribe and which has little to offer the argument being made here. By contrast, remembering the physical force of the architectural figure is

a welcome reminder of the open-ended, interstitial potential of landing. Landings are pauses, moments frequently marked by an extraordinary intensity of self-reflection and the possibility of setting a new course, of opening oneself to a new direction, not from an ahistorical ‘empty’ starting point, but from the material legacy of the journey undertaken thus far. Landing is the promise of the future that does not simply forget the past, but can transform it, through practices of the interfaces, of those spaces that bring us face-to-face with ourselves and others, with our ethical relation within the world of which we are always, already, a part. Landing is both a noun and a verb, it is a crossing between object

and process, an event. Likewise, the title of Valamanesh’s work, Longing/ Belonging, is a crossing that evokes a complex conceptual and affective territory through an eloquent economy of means. I would suggest that engaging with the terms set out by the title offers a useful starting point in thinking

through the problem of the time and space of the subject-in-process, and that that problem is crucial to anyone seeking an adequate means by which to figure the experience of migration and the potential of transnational, crosscultural communication to establish a cosmopolitan imaginary. Longing has many nuanced variants, most of which focus on the past, on

the intense desire to return to a moment now gone or to retrieve an object now lost.3 Longing in this sense links to nostalgia, wistfulness and, of course, homesickness, that term used especially to describe exiles or migrants who forever seek the source of their identity in the departed home, homeland or nation, and to which, of course, they can never truly return. No doubt many exiles have been lost to just this kind of longing, forever engaged in the futile quest to return to or retrieve the past. But the etymology of longing is more evocative than this singular reading

permits; the Old English springs from a Germanic source, verlangen, to desire. Desire need not be backward-looking, longing need not seek the past, but, instead, may describe our avidity, ambition and aspiration for the future, for the possibility of beauty and wonder yet to come. As the opposite of indifference, longing embodies us, locates us as desiring agents within the world, a world that is forever in flux and which, thus, unfolds its potential at every turn. Longing is the very essence of creative engagement in the world, it has a powerful generative capacity, it makes.4 To long in this sense advances, moves forward, drives change and opens the desiring subject to alterity, to the new and, significantly, to others. Creative gestures borne of longing are thus the materialization of our desire for/with others in the world and our hopes and aspirations to change its contours in future. Longing is neither backwardlooking nor teleological by necessity; it can be, instead, open, permeable and emergent. But what of Valamanesh’s word-play, of his conjunction between longing

and belonging? Again, I would argue that this is not as simple as it might at first seem. Like longing, belonging is frequently associated with the experience of the migrant, with the establishment of community (or its impossibility). In this sense, belonging can be collapsed into a state of fixity or permanence, or used to close ranks – ‘you don’t belong here’. Additionally, belonging has a strong relationship to notions of home and homeland, to the acquisition of identity and status through an association with, or a belonging to, a specific and identifiable geo-political territory and/or culture. To belong is often conflated with being at home and, where homes are defined as fortresses, belonging (or not) can be a vexed question. But belonging can be reconfigured to admit of change, development and

multiplicity – what Elspeth Probyn has compellingly called ‘outside belonging’.5 Not coincidentally, Probyn’s work calls for the development of creative tropes that permit us to articulate belonging otherwise; in my terms, as mobile, mutable and yet thoroughly embodied, as cognisant of the past but not imprisoned by it, capable of linking the material effects with the affective

dynamics of be(com)ing at home. Here we are closer to the conception of belonging that resides at its etymological base – going along with – travelling together, taking the same path, sharing the journey. It is a belonging linked not to a fixed origin point, but to wayfaring, to the future and to the active generation of meaning between ‘fellow travellers’, communicating across differences. The agency of belonging is collective flow, not isolated dambuilding; selves who belong undertake an active form of inter-subjective engagement, rather than a passive assumption of position through definition, through reference to the past or an originary home. I would argue that the cathected pairing Longing/Belonging figures landing

in a profoundly apt and unusually succinct way, one that enables us to explore the experience of migration as a future-oriented process, premised upon the permeability of the emergent subject. The same can be argued regarding the visual and material qualities of the work. It is comprised, essentially, of four elements: the Persian carpet, the landscape, the fire and the photograph. Each element speaks to the generative potential of longing and to the aspiration of the wayfarer for belonging through connections across multiple differences. Taken together, they provide a landing, a space in which we might also stop, reflect and open ourselves to the potential afforded by a journey no longer tethered to a presumed destination. In one sense, the carpet is the most quotidian of the elements, a motif indi-

cative of home and hearth, of home-making and settlement. But, as a domestic object, the carpet is also steeped in histories of migration, trade and transit. Carpets are not fixed to a single space, they are quickly rolled and carried by the itinerant, able to be unfurled as needed to provide comfort in even the most inhospitable circumstances. Persian carpets, specifically, are embedded within a tradition of trade and exchange that has long connected the region we now call the Middle East with the rest of the world. The mythic status of Persian carpets (magic/flying carpets) further develops this legacy of movement, and reminds us that Valamanesh’s carpet is as much about the remarkable narrative of transnational migration as it is about the moment of settlement. The Persian carpet, then, acts as a multivalent symbol of displacement and emplacement, connecting their utilitarian purposes with a powerful imaginative resonance, bringing traders, collectors and storytellers together through a global economy of domestic exchange. The landscape of Northern Australia is stark, beautiful and unmistakable;

its vast skies, red earth and combination of flora and fauna are unique in the world. Indigenous Australians inhabited this land for thousands of years before European settlement, and their patterns of inhabitation acknowledged movement, change and interplay with the environment as mutually sustaining. In general terms, this was utterly misunderstood by the settlers who first arrived – they could not recognise these practices of inhabitation as settlement in their terms, bound, as they were, to stasis and the maintenance of hard-andfast borders. Settlement meant bending the environment to your will, making

the earth conform and mapping it as owned territory. It is hardly original to point out that our homes are not simply given to us, but are made, sometimes with imagination and ingenuity, other times with force. The Europeans who made this land their home used both their ingenuity and the force of their technology to chart the space and transform what they termed Terra nullius into Australia.6