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	Here,There,Elsewhere: Dialogues on Location and Mobility Contemporary Steve Pile ’In Here, There, Elsewhere David Blamey has very carefully placed a wide range of different pieces side-by-side. There are academic essays, reflective pieces by academics and artists, photo-essays, e-mails, lists, encounters, travelogues and more. Intriguingly, Blamey’s positioning of these various ’pieces’ within the book offers exactly the dialogue that the subtitle of the book claims. You have to read between the essays to really build up a picture of places and mobility. One essay, for example, talks of how the residents of a Hong Kong suburb seek to live a Californian version of the American Dream. This essay is immediately followed by one in which a poet describes his search for a life beyond the American Dream, in some ways by producing a different dream of California. These two sets of experiences of place are subtly connected and contrasted simply by being placed together: spatial stories are illuminated by crumpling the map. This collection works on many different levels, in many ways it will engage intellectually and inspire new projects, but this is also about the mundane and the ordinary aspects of living in a world in which mobility is common-place and places are commonly extraordinary... this book is personally engaging, eye-catching and always thought-provoking. Placing artists work side by side by the work of critics changes and accentuates both, giving us a book that is far greater than the sum of its parts Ð it's a book worth having’. (Contemporary no.47/48, p106-07) Engage Alexia Defert ’The book questions the way one constructs one's own sense of location Ð seen as a vital symbolic platform for artistic and cultural production - and the idea of mobility is then progressively worked through various notions of location... Blamey deflects the editor's traditional authorial, summarising role, preferring instead to enter into more ambiguous and fragmented contact with the work of the other contributors... the book as a whole resists any clear statement about constructing a firm location from where to speak. Instead, there is the sense of constantly reinventing oneself by embracing new locations: as Barry Curtis and Claire Pajaczkowska write in ’Location Envy’, 'As location is the place from which we are constituted as subjects it usually constitutes the ’blind spot’ from which envy and desire issue’. (Engage no.13, p73-76) Parachute Alex Coles ’One of the most judicious things about Here, There, Elsewhere is how the introduction is composed from a juxtaposition of images. This is noticeable because it is so unusual. Most editors wouldn't be able to resist the temptation of laying out a grand-plan via a muscular textual polemic. Instead David Blamey composes an open-minded introduction through a series of faded colour snap-shots, ranging from one of Prince Charles with Guyanan village girls to the Mexican Enrique Aquilar Canchola found hidden in a bus seat while attempting to illegally cross the U.S. border. Each has its own poignancy and relation to the others by way of the central theme laid out in the book's title. The surprising use of images as a surrogate for the introduction sets the tone of things to come: the book's textual contribution are anything but what you would expect from from a less independent editor and publisher. Each contribution aerates the very notion of the stable academic text’. (Parachute no.109, p141) European Journal of Communication Book Notes ’The book as a whole adds up to a series of descriptions and reflections on freedom of movement and where this takes us. How much of a benefit is it, and in what ways? How far do you have to go from location before you experience dislocation? Why are places left? And when you go, do you know where you are going? Simple questions, but in many cases the answers are difficult. This is an innovative book - a workshop as much as a resource - and thoroughly worth a good look’. (European Journal of Communication no.4, vol.17, p530-31) Eye Christopher Wilson ’Those seeking academic reference will be frustrated by the lightweight 'practice' pieces; the sheer quantity of text will ward off any coffee table vultures. Some readers might take the lack of coherence in Here, There, Elsewhere to be its point: current issues of global travel and mobility are a mess on levels both theoretical and artistic. But if this is the intention, it is a dull and unhelpful one. In its refusal to break down the potentially all-inclusive subject - or at least to plot a specific directional route through it - the editorial policy of this book fails its occasionally excellent contents, and its message is left sitting on the fence, somewhere’. (Eye no.45 vol.12, p86)
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