Why are we here?
We acknowledge our ‘real’ world is fragile, damaged, insecure. We move through it nonetheless, without pausing .

We ourselves are damaged by the climate crisis, human crisis, rubbish crisis and other crises. We offer to build a community around commitment and empathy towards each other and towards other creatures that are also damaged.

We, in our species, are all complicit in what happened to our world. But still, this world is still worth wandering through.

THE SUN SETS EIGHT TIMES A DAY: We are artists across eight countries under the same sun, who worked in a common digital space for two years now, and wish to open this community to all other countries. You are invited to be playful, perhaps create things, watch, listen, and navigate your way through this space. There will be other people around the world also taking part. You might meet them on the way, and this way the community may grow. Co-worlding here may aid change in our real worlds.
What is this world?
A map shows us paths, directions, scaling and orientation. It shows the boundaries and distances between regions, countries, roads and buildings.
Although it is usually considered normal and beneficial for all, we should acknowledge that a map is a simplified visual representation of the world that does not reflect heterogeneities and complexities.
Looking at the history of civilization and colonization, cartography and mapping – these were means of power to literally draw the borders, appropriate lands, and therefore became a stage for the domination of territories. Probably this is why wanderers started to disappear from the world. The existing maps ironically (mis)communicate the idea that everything has already been found, known and documented. We think otherwise.
It is no coincidence that the practices of migration, displacement and gentrification are closely linked to the functioning of maps. We are aware of this and want to make mischief.
What does the NonMap do?
NonMap is a space of potential, a communal open territory that reserves the right to reshape the paths taken and to rethink by challenging the Map-centric mentality.
Imagine that nowhere there is already a connection. The wanderers make the connections. Routes are created by walkers taking unpaved sidewalks, finding their own directions, and meeting at intersections, entrances, or in a temporary refuge. The appearing paths are the footsteps of the wanderers. Imagine this as an individual yet collective experience in a larger form.

How do you create the paths? With your decisions. With where you begin, how you move, how long you linger, what you share, where you stop?
You shape your narrative by your participation; by the time you wait for another to join you; where you speed; where you ponder; where you skip or just look and pass; where you leave a mark.

Where do we go with this?
To live together the human species have entered into contracts. Between individuals, between communities, between ethnic groups, between cities, between nations, between larger communities with the same interests…over time interests have cracked and damaged much of the potential common space between individuals, communities, ethnic groups, cities and nations.
Here we venture to imagine a contract only governed by common interests: A joint agreement based on duo-thinking, a two-way conversation, like a co-creative processual communal performance. A new social contract is the horizon of this NonMap. All the space inbetween is our common potential created by individual paths. How do we think globally on a map without borders?
Is a constitution conceivable that consists of global and local?
Are we able to imagine a “glocal” constitution?
Parts of it? Elements of it? The smell of it? The ripple of a common imagination of it?
This NonMap is the practical realization of that desire in a digital space that yearns to develop a methodology for sustainable collaborations between artists and open the space to participant interaction in hopes of creating a symbiotic experience.

Now take my hand, come with me…
Let's wander together through the NonMap in the footprints of other wanderers, in search of symbiotic joy. Let's leave our mark for the next wanderers who will wander here for the first time, joining multiple suns that were sacrificed… Perhaps we will survive the next drought of being.

Credit:

Youness Atbane (Morocco), Zarif Bakirova (Azerbaijan), Amitesh Grover (India), Abdalla
Daif (Egypt), Lucy Ellinson (Cymru/Wales, UK), Daniel Hengst (Germany), Azade
Shahmiri (Iran), Maya Zbib (Lebanon), Lydia Ziemke (Germany) Mykola Gomanuk
(Ukraine) Pierre Depaz, Célestin Meunier.

Supported By:
Joining Suns is developed as part of "dive in. Programme for Digital Interactions" of the
Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) with funding by the
Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM) through the
NEUSTART KULTUR programme.