Songlines
Urbane Nomads was founded in 2008 to offer luxury adventure travel to remote places. It closed in 2020, when Covid stopped travel, and we moved on to other ventures: Reverse Orientalism, an interior design practice that works through a geopolitical lens, and Pre-Emptive Diplomacy, which anticipates how states and other actors will respond before they move. Each takes the same sensibility, and the same eye for design, culture and politics, into a different industry. This globe is a record of where Urbane Nomads went, painted as a songline.
On Instagram: @womancalledwild and @reverse.orientalism
Each circle on the globe opens a micro-world, made to be played as a game and heard as much as seen. Wrestle a bout in a Tokyo sumo stable. Play camel polo on the dunes of the Nubra Valley, where the teams change ends after every goal. Fly a kite in figures of eight and feel how kite-skiing works in Norway. Call a golden eagle down to the glove in Mongolia, sing humpback whales towards you in Tonga, lead the wildebeest across a river of crocodiles in the Serengeti, or climb a Kamchatka volcano past the bears to the crater rim at sunrise. Turn the sound on: in every world, each line you draw is a note.
In many Aboriginal Australian traditions, the world was sung into being. Ancestral beings travelled across the land, and as they went they named and sang everything they passed: rocks, waterholes, ridges, trees. Their tracks are the songlines.
A songline is a map and a song at once. Its verses follow the land in order, so knowing the song means knowing the way. Songlines run across many language groups. A song could pass from one people to the next, and the country it described stayed the same.
Bruce Chatwin brought the idea to a wide readership in The Songlines (1987). For Aboriginal perspectives, Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly's Songlines: The Power and Promise and the National Museum of Australia's exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters are good places to begin.
The painting
The globe borrows the visual language of Western Desert dot painting. The movement began at Papunya in 1971, when senior men, encouraged by the teacher Geoffrey Bardon, began painting ancestral stories on boards and canvas. Papunya Tula Artists was formed the following year. In that language, concentric circles often mark a place, such as a waterhole or a camp, and lines of dots trace the journeys between them.
Bruce Chatwin's first book, In Patagonia (1977), followed a journey to the far south of South America. Urbane Nomads was first imagined there too, so the song on this globe begins in Patagonia.
Here the circles are the places Urbane Nomads went, and the dotted tracks are the routes between them. Each place has its own mode and its own voice. Play the song and the tracks light up in turn, one note at a time, until the whole route has been sung.