FootNotes invites you on a wandering – and wondering – tour with a collection of essays intended as walking-writing meditations. You will be taken down a number of different meandering routes, some well-trodden others still untouched, into the past as well as the future. Our premise underlying the walking-writing experiment is that no matter how carefully the planning and framing of our steps and ideas might be, walking and writing always have the potential to move us towards the unknown. This should not frighten us, since to wonder or even get lost holds a promise to move us beyond the known barriers, frames, and realities – into a world yet to come. But here is the trick. Walking and thinking with the (un)known and the (im)possible, with the yet-to-come, presents us only with a potentiality, yet to be actualised and narrated; we can so easily miss it, or step over it, or contort it to make it more manageable. To unwrap the gift of potentiality holding a promise of a good story, one needs to walk and write carefully and carelessly at the same time, keeping the balance between the possible and the actual, willing to play seriously, knowing that the magic of writing comes with a price.
Our humble wish is to expand the initial project Route Biographies, from where the FootNotes sprang and to throw the doors open onto future authors and diverse initiatives. Wondering with different routes and stories, FootNotes and its authors aim to attune with others, with their journeys, travails, fears, and hopes to (un)learn together about the here and now, but also about the possible and future world(s), about the unexpected routes and stories that have a penchant for the faraway and the wisdom of kindness. We have envisaged this as a joint endeavour belonging not only to those who write and walk but also to those who share their knowledge, who stay behind, or are trapped in stillness, or caught up in never-ending circulations, or even slow disappearances. This is to say that FootNotes are ‘anthropological’ in the widest meaning of the term, intended to push against the disciplinary boundaries, while at the same time endorsing a methodology that belongs innately to the discipline. Namely, anthropology is founded on a method of experience and encounter, a method called ethnography and described by Anand Pandian as a practice of critical observation and imagination, an endeavour to trace the outlines of a possible world within the seams of this one (2019: 4). Following this line of thought, FootNotes aim to observe as opposed to judge, to pry open rather than foreclose, to embrace instead of withdraw, to move and be moved in lieu of standing still, regardless of how (un)comfortable any of these make us feel.
The form of the essay is of particular importance here due to its slow and winding nature. Namely, Footnotes wishes to be patient with a wide range of experimental efforts, inviting forms of writing (in the broadest sense) that experiment and dare lose themselves, having the courage to walk on shaky ground. The conjoint idea of slow wandering and dreaming also hopes to topple the walls of authoritative writing all too often supporting colonial and other hierarchical power relations, as well as inviting writings that are indeed anthropological but may not be written by professionals. Essays – in textual, photographic, video, or hybrid mode – seem to be particularly suited for this endeavour as they resemble never-ending long conversations where not only does no one have the final word but there simply is no final word. Such writing acts as a method that thrives on uncertainty, admits to unknowability, and welcomes the unexpected. Ephemeral traces of a meandering meditation. A route.
Nataša Rogelja Caf