helen grace

In 2005, I took part in the experimental event Capturing the Moving Mind, a ten day journey on the TransSiberian Railway between Moscow and Beijing.Set up by the online journal ephemera: theory & politics in organization, the ‘self-organising’ event involved around 50 people – artists, activists, philosophers and political theorists, taking over two and a half carriages of the train traveling East.



Just after we boarded the train in Moscow, I asked the occupants of ten of the cabins to record their first thoughts, their last thoughts and their sense of the movement of thought each day through the journey.



Between then and now, life changed, and I followed, in a sense, the mantra of the journey,  ‘To move without cause, to organise without ends, to flee the war against intellect.’ I moved to Hong Kong and Taiwan for ten years on and off, caught up in institutional demands, setting up programs and absorbed in the day to day imperatives of academic life that extract all the energy from a person that s/he has to give.



I didn’t have time to go back to the project, and so, this work revisits the earlier fieldwork diaries, mobilising them, allowing them the time and space to emerge from the shadows of my imperfect archive and its unfinished projects and good intentions. Fieldwork takes time to reveal itself and the thought – and thinking – that informed the 2005 event seems now to have more relevance than ever.



‘Movement without cause is the origin of restlessness and unrest. It compels power to move, outside of its castles. When movement has many directions and possible meanings, when we don’t know where we are and where we are going, we have to start to grope about, to touch, to experiment.’ (Vähämäki)