2. 四月 2024
Photo: Screenshot from “Journey to the East: Amsterdam to Istanbul (Feb 1- March 5)” on YouTube
Writer, curator, and educator Ole Bouman is in the midst of a “Journey to the East”: a roughly 7,000-mile (11,250-km) bicycle tour from Amsterdam to Shanghai and Tongji University, where he currently teaches. Bouman is documenting the journey through his website, social media, and a YouTube channel.
As explained in the first post on his Journey to the East blog, Bouman believes that “East and West need to come together as never before.” Why? Because “the most existential reason for east and west to stand together is to prepare for the looming existential climate disasters which only our joint efforts will be able to address.” So Bouman is undertaking the journey to help foster “a new Silk for the 21st century. A new Road for sustainable and lasting connections.”
Not just a solo journey, Bouman is connecting with people along the way — “designers, curators, historians, or creative individuals on this path, who would like to meet, greet and perhaps collaborate.” His latest blog post, from Easter, finds him “not even halfway on this road to China,” apparently in Turkey in the middle of Ramadan. The first of hopefully more videos posted to YouTube shows parts of his journey from Amsterdam, where he left on February 1, to Istanbul, where he arrived on March 15:
Thanks to the always fun and informative PUMP UP THE VOLUME — the every-two-weeks newsletter of Archis and Volume, both of which Bouman played a major role in shaping — for bringing the Journey to the East to our attention.