From the Editor:

To travel is to explore.

To migrate is to distort. Unless, of course, you came to displace. To stay.

To be shipped is not to be human. To be on the wrong ship too.

Naturally, it is not about the vehicle but much more so about those who use it. 

To be movable and transportable is logistics. 

Mobility is a condition of possibility for all life on earth. To be mobile, to be able to move – one’s own body, from one place to another, people, services, goods and things – has always qualified the chance for collective survival. Mobility is manifold, even multimodal it seems, because it involves a mix of different modes of holding and conveying meaning. By now even its own discipline, mobility has influenced methodological approaches, and conceptually marks an entry point into thinking about the organization, control, governance and management of land, people and systems of all sorts. Mobility has also become a means to make profit; its economic value is dependent on as well as informing sites of migration, computation and capitalism. They all, of course, exist in relation to each other.

Roaming the digital sphere to the atmosphere in today's world, information must flow, in the body, through the network, within microorganisms and global value chains. Here, mobility becomes a potentiality to overcome time(s) as well as space(s). In other words: it also designates conquest of space and subservience to a specific, mostly rooted in Western philosophical thought, concept of time. Mobility also masks and camouflages the limits of such space and the constraints of this specific time, where mobile devices grant permanent access to a global network in a hyper-connected world but physical mobility, the possibility to overcome physical space to be able to live in the first place and to reconfigure time for the same purpose, remains inaccessible to many. Mobility can be registered, both, under affirming terms or terms of challenge, refusal or rejection.  

The five contributions of this drop show that mobility occurs in and for different forms. It seems to often serve purposes that produce consequences, contexts, and constellations of ambivalence or contradiction. This, of course, is only appropriate in a world as complex as the one we call our's. Every text and respective title reveal this inherent quality of mobility, which is further augmented, emboldened even, through the chosen color scheme as well as, in their very own complexity, deeply striking and intricate illustrations. All contributions appear against an indigo background. As Luiza Prado De Oliveira Martins discussed in her contra-colonial series, indigo blue has itself had quite a history of accompanying different kinds of mobilities (Prado De Oliveira Martins 2021). And with that, at least here and now, the indigo blue signifies extraction as much as expansion of water and violence, colonial history as much as the beauty of the sky, it's openness and uncertainty as much as the digital cloud and futurity or the archive of the deep sea, practices of textile or gemstone production, and much more to be imagined and revealed.

-Nelly Y. Pinkrah

Edna Bonhomme is a historian of science, culture writer, and editor based in Berlin, Germany. She writes feature articles, creative nonfiction, and book reviews. Her writing has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, The Baffler, Esquire, Frieze, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The Nation, WIRED, and other publications. A graduate of Princeton University’s Ph.D. program in History of Science, she holds awards and fellowships from the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, the Ludwig Maximilian Universität, the Camargo Foundation, and the Baldwin for the Arts. Edna’s book, A History of the World in Six Plagues (Simon & Schuster), is forthcoming.

Josephine Rapp is a molecular microbial ecologist specialized in life in the cryosphere. She has been studying Arctic marine ecosystems for more than 10 years. Her work has taken her on multiple month-long research expeditions to the Arctic Ocean where she kept falling in love with the sight of sea ice over and over again. After completing her doctoral research at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology and the University of Bremen, she has joined interdisciplinary teams both in the US and in Canada to explore microbial life in subzero brines and the interactions between microbes and their viruses. Currently, she is based at Université Laval in Québec, but as an early-career researcher she is already thinking about potential next hosting institutions, somewhat similar to the mobile genetic elements in the text (just without being lethal).

Sinthujan Varatharajah is an essayist and political geographer based in Berlin. Their work deals with issues of statelessness and displacement from a spatial, logistical and materialistic perspective. In 2018, Varatharajah co-founded the event series "dissolving territories - cultural geographies of a new eelam", which explores the everyday consequences of statelessness through the lense of aesthetics and politics. In 2020 they were part of the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art with their exhibition "how to* move an arche". In 2022, together with Moshtari Hilal, Varatharajah published the chapbook "English in Berlin", which deals with questions of language and political exclusions in the urban space of Berlin. In autumn 2022, their first book, "an alle orte, die hinter uns liegen" (to all the places we have left behind), a book examining colonial techniques of violence, was published by Hanser Verlag in autumn 2022.

Lotte Warnsholdt is a cultural and media scholar. She studied European Ethnology, Philosophy, and Cultural Studies in Copenhagen, Hamburg, and Lüneburg. Warnsholdt is an alumna of the DFG Research Training Group «Cultures of Critique» at Leuphana University Lüneburg and was a Junior Fellow at IFK Vienna and Visiting Scholar at HFBK Hamburg. Her research interests include the cultural and media history of modernity, theories of care, and forms of critique in the digital. This is also reflected in her doctoral thesis «In the Shadow of Silence. Modern Semantics of Secrecy», in which Warnsholdt worked on the in- and exclusionary cultural techniques of silence and secrecy. Since 2023, Lotte Warnsholdt has been a research associate (postdoc) at the German Maritime Museum, Leibniz Institute of Maritime History in Bremerhaven. Here she researches the media history, aspects of care, and colonial entanglements of 19th century seafaring.

Illustration Notes:

MOBILITY DISPATCH