“Kimberly Campanello and Christodoulos Makris have created a telling tribute to the way we travel now. A lockdown Word tour, by travelling without moving, we can be moved without travelling. But wherever we go there’s nowhere to escape our vocabulary: wish you were here!”
sorry that you were not moved is an interactive collaborative digital poetry publication by Kimberly Campanello and Christodoulos Makris exploring space-time dimensions of travel through experimental-appropriative writing strategies and audiovisual interventions. It was created in collaboration with Ian Maleney of Fallow Media, inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and made with the support of an Arts Council Literature Project Award.
Click here to travel.
“The title of the digital text/poem sorry that you were not moved says it all, but that makes engagement with this hybrid, fractured, globe-spanning work all the more worthwhile. It’s the experience of non-experience, a diffusion/confusion of ‘presence’, the world seen through a GoPro, packed with disposable insights frozen for posterity online. Here is the tourists’ casual, dismissive ‘doing’ of places. Here is the limit and simultaneous paucity of travel writing, the comforting non-space of armchair travel, the local beer glass half full of emptiness – this is the dynamic of Sorry That You Were Not Moved. As global travel passes its peak, listen: you can hear its engines idle, rumble, stall.”
“When we are moved, we are transported—literally from one place to another, and figuratively from a state of self-awareness to a place beyond the self. A poem, a performance, a film, a book—those things that have the power to transport us are often elevated to the status of art. And yet it is also possible to be moved by a punk concert, by the news of a celebrity’s death, by a public memorial. In this work, Makris and Campanello play with both forms of movement, giving readers hemmed in by the pandemic an opportunity to travel, via desktop tourism, and to contemplate what they call “the traveller’s gaze,” which often seeks to possess all that it describes. Melding 90’s browser aesthetics with contemporary maps and media, the project invites us to travel across not only space, but also time—based, as it is, in memories of travel both personal and imagined. Linking what appear to be personal reminiscences with text, image, and video culled from the web, their epistolary exploration takes us to a series of cities in which the authors find legacies of poetry and art that help us think through what it means to observe and be observed, to move and be moved.”
“Both conceptually and aesthetically it’s a fascinating experience, and so well put together, and it made me thankful that there are venues for this kind of creative work in Ireland. It’s beautiful and so appropriate to this cold covid-plagued January.”