Heading out into the desert, we try to read the physical vestiges of contemporary history on the landscape. We've taken tours that cover over 500 miles in a day and kind of wear people out. It's kind of an adventure, an odyssey. The voyeurism of the tourist on these buses, traveling past unglamorous, often desolate areas, can turn self-reflective. There's a lot of power being able to be in this bus.
Mobility is a privilege, people pay for it.
Of course, the inverse of the empowered, self-propelled tourist is the refugee, the person involuntarily displaced. A bus project directly addressing the difference between choosing to move and having to move was proposed by artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock in 1995 for Berlin's Holocaust Memorial Competition. The Non-Monument engendered controversy even though it was never produced. In the proposal, buses would pull up to the vast, empty space under the Brandenburg Gate in the center of Berlin. As Schnock has pointed out, placing this phrase on the buses would make it a memorial in perpetual motion.