ABSTRACT
In May 2013, I embarked on a four-week road trip with the German artist Mirja Busch through the American southwest. The trip was the key juncture in an artistic project on which she worked for about two years and which, at some point, we began to call the Tracing Land Art project. Each day we spent many hours working at different outdoor locations in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, making temporary interventions in the landscape with different objects and documenting these in various media. An inordinate part of our time, however, was spent driving a recreational vehicle (RV) along an 8600-kilometre route whilst engaging in all sort of domestic and mundane activities: cooking, cleaning, buying groceries, moving stuff around, finding the way, taking pictures, silently looking through the window, engaging in long conversations – about the places we’d visited, about our relationship, about where to stop next, about my upcoming ethnography of a video game company, about the concept behind the Tracing Land Art project, about the activities of the day before, about the exhibition resulting from the trip, about follow-up projects, and so on. We also profusely discussed the practical difficulties and challenges resulting from working on-site and on-route, especially when contrasted with Mirja’s work in the studio. We spent long hours talking about the romanticized ways in which Land Art artists established an opposition between the studio and the site, and began to think about the various continuities and similarities between studio-based and site-specific work.
