Dispersed and Connected. Artistic Fragments Along the Silk and Steppe Roads

The project collects and explores narrations, images and imaginations, fragments and artistic expressions of Mongolian belonging along old and new steppe and silk routes, which link dispersed and connected biographies, artistic traditions, cultural monuments and memories. These fragments will be joined in an artistic exhibition at the Weltmuseum Wien, a film montage and a concomitant scientific-artistic fieldwork book. Hereby, fast processes of transformation as a result of establishing new roads will be juxtaposed to slow narrations and memories of individuals as well as historic artefacts and fresh artistic works developed within the project. This research therefore opens a unique space to individual and artistic voices in response to current and future determining emerging global- economic large-scale projects and plans. The artists and scientists (social and cultural anthropologists, musicologists and archaeologists) of the core project team, who work in both fields, will document and collect fragments of expressions developed by formulating specific questions on themes such as mobility, nomadism, memory, cultural/knowledge transfers and identity along the roads to create a mosaic or an artistic project cartography for a joint exhibition and publication. The artistic works include photographs, videos, film, language and poems, songs and music, and drawings as different forms of narration lines. Museum artefacts will be links or starting points for these forms of narrations which show the fragmented and yet interwoven sidelines and branches of existing and emerging roads which transform the landscapes like an expanding uncontrolled nervous system. Artists from the Mongolian Republic and the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region of China, who are related by their history and spatially linked by those roads and routes, will be invited to create new works, deriving from project-laboratories, which will be integrated into the museum exhibition. A new multi-layered collection, seen through the eyes of the other will be added to and enliven the historic ethnographic collections.

The project "Dispersed and Connected. Artistic Fragments along the Steppe and Silk Roads" collected and explored multi-layered narrations, images and imaginations, fragments and artistic expressions along old and new Steppe and Silk Roads which link dispersed and connected biographies, artistic traditions, cultural monuments and memories. For this, rapid processes of transformation as a result of establishing infrastructures such as roads and railways were juxtaposed to "slow" narratives and memories of individuals as well as historic artefacts and fresh artistic works developed within the project. The project therefore opened a unique space to individual and artistic voices in response to current and emerging global-economic large-scale infrastructure projects and plans such as China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The scientists and artists of the core project team documented manifold and polyphonic expressions developed by formulating specific questions on themes such as mobility, nomadism, materialities, globalisation, resource extraction, imperialism and colonialism, knowledge transfers and belongings along the roads to create a montage and a project map for the exhibitions "Dust & Silk" at the Weltmuseum Wien (2021/2022), "Steppe & Silk Roads" at the Museum am Rothenbaum (MARKK) in Hamburg (2020/2021) and "Dust & Silk" and "Multiverse" at the Völkerkundemuseum VPST in Heidelberg (2023/2024). The artistic works developed or documented in the project included photographs, videos, film, songs and music, maps, paintings and drawings, objects and textiles as different forms of narrative lines. Museum artefacts were links or starting points for these forms of narrative, which show the fragmented and yet interwoven sidelines and branches of existing and emerging roads which transform the landscapes like an expanding uncontrolled nervous system. The artists Nomin Bold, Baterdene Batchuluun, Baatarzorig Batjargal and Khosbayar Narankhuu from the Mongolian Republic, Dilyara Kaipova and Umida Akhmedova from Uzbekistan, Tatia Skhirtladze from Georgia and the artists Johannes Heuer, Paul Kolling, Marylise Vigneau and Jack Wolf from Europe created new works, which were integrated into the museum exhibitions in constellation with audio-visual field research documentation and museum artefacts. A new multi-layered polyphonic collection, seen - through the eyes of the other - was added to and enlivened the historic ethnographic collections. The project homepage designed by the artist Johannes Heuer represents a documentation of important project parts and is in itself a kind of project field notebook: https://dispersedandconnected.net/en/