In the film Baraka, the camera�s omniscient eye decontextualizes the seen, exploiting images for their aesthetic and emotional qualities without bearing in mind the daily lived histories of the bodies and geographies connected to those images. A digressive response to Baraka, in transit(ion) attempts to contextualize the notion of the global lived locally, using Berkeley as its focal point.

In this brief photomontage of images captured from Berkeley, the city is envisioned as a series of seemingly disparate past moments recollected, fleetingly, shot after shot. In constant transit within the city, the camera�s eye roams among the spaces that bodies occupy: houses, streets, libraries, museums, restaurants, stores, cemeteries, junkyards, and other places where feet may wander, willed by necessity, privilege or by accident. The video/diary attempts to capture the accidental and the mundane, the moments that go unrecorded or misremembered.

Within memory the city is dismembered and recomposed, given breath by the stories of those who inhabit it. Rather than using a soundtrack carefully composed in order to elicit certain emotional responses like Baraka, in transit/ion uses many voices, mainly the responses of friends and strangers to a series of questions concerning location. Although the city is precariously remembered frame by frame, the video/diary�s soundtrack serves as its context, attempting to ground these images with birth-dates, the names of cities, descriptions of inhabited space.

Ideally, the voices would demonstrate the notion of the transnational as a phenomenon that happens locally. The transnational occurs fleetingly, accidentally, often invisibly. By naming past and future cities and describing where they are now, the voices recall, if briefly and obscurely, the experiences and desires associated with movement.

As a city people have inhabited and left behind for other places somewhere else in the world, Berkeley is another way station among many other way stations, a city always in the midst of the necessary de/composition that accompany bodies in transit/ion.

er, I guess you just had to be there...

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