Invisible Trajectories: Passing Through the Inland Empire
Wignall Museum / Chaffey College
Rancho Cucamonga, California
January 22 – March 3, 2007
Everyone has a story, after all, and it's the juxtaposition and intersection of citizen's many stories that creates the truest impression of a city.
-Andrea Moed, Conversations With Maps
Inside the wrinkles of the city, spaces exist in transit have grown, territories in continuous transformation in time. These are the places where today it is possible to go beyond the age-old division between nomadic space and settled space.
-Francesco Careri
Invisible Trajectories: Passing Through the Inland Empire is a story project that was conceived almost two years ago by Claude Willey and Deena Capparelli. At that time, the two set out, with the much-needed help of Mark Tsang, to map the previously uncharted: the vast stretch of urban settlement known as California’s Inland Empire and the obscure pathways utilized by its mobile citizens. In March 2005, the group started a number of short-range reconnaissance missions from their base in Alta Loma, California, probing the various boundaries and routes that define this expanding mega-region. One year ago, the group acquired funding from the California Council for the Humanities' California Stories Initiative to further develop their working process and range of activity. Since that time, the trio has traveled the expanse of the Inland Empire, engaging directly with some of its citizens and collecting observations and sorted tales from their junkets.
The stories presented here are derived from a series of interwoven, overlapping, and intricately linked journeys. The stories are told by a group of urban travelers, their hosts, and guides, who have surveyed the vast Empire on foot and bicycle with occasional excursions undertaken via bus and automobile. Revealing the extraordinary behind the mundane, this nomadic group has sifted through their archives to reconstruct their maneuvers with maps, written excerpts, photographs, and Internet blogs. Understand that there is no beginning, middle, or end on this site. Expect only to find the fragments, lost thoughts, and vague recollections as there is no specific argument to be supported.
On the macro-level, this project was designed to document the experience of travel within the landscape of the Inland Empire, one of the fastest growing regions in the country, against the backdrop of world oil decline. Access, development, growth, and mobility are all issues of concern here, but none take center stage. This is what you get when you observe a key node in the global economy, the Inland Empire, through the eyes of those who inhabit it. The invisible trajectories of commuters, material goods, immigrants, and electronic data all seem to converge in this age of hyper-mobility. The only cohesive threads pulling all of these stories together are the close ties of mobility, stasis, and uncertainly.
Where are we going and why?
Claude Willey & Deena Capparelli
December, 2006
Find more information online at:
iemobilities.typepad.com/
www.chaffey.edu/wignall/current.shtml
greenmuseum.org/generic_content.php?ct_id=229#willey
moisture.greenmuseum.org/
