Elizabeth Dorbad

     Itinerancy is defined as a traveling. Moving from place to place or on a circuit, the reasons for itinerating might be to fulfill a duty or a call; it might be fortunate or unfortunate circumstance; it might be compulsion of another sort. The project is an attempt at mapping the itinerant: individuals, societies and ideas. It considers people who itinerate: vagabonds, rogues, drifters, street people, migrant workers, immigrants, refugees, musicians, preachers, wandering monks, hobos, tramps, judges, farmers, and gleaners. It includes vehicles, train lines, highways, and shopping carts, migrating animals and architectures devoted to moving. It covers nomadic philosophies: the ideas that forefront the understanding of becoming over being and change over stasis. The challenge is to pin down something on the move; the itinerant is defined by inherent displacement. This endeavor is based upon the understanding that life systems are always in flux.  It considers rates of change both geologic and technologic. The map is defunct as soon as it is drawn.

     The Hatchery project focused on the nature of itinerant architectures, in this case mobile home trailers.  These buildings describe ideas of temporality, impermanence and opportunity that seemingly run counter to notions of domesticity. In a state of decay, the architecture continues to exemplify nomadism and the passage of time. Even during the breakdown of physical structure, the itinerant identity remains.  The final artwork was a comment on this architecture, this identity, and the constancy of change.

     The Hatchery: East of Fresno brought forty international artists to a rural location in Badger, California for artist residencies and an exhibition. Itinerant Architectures utilized a group of seven abandoned mobile home trailers at The Hatchery as site and source material. The works included: Mobilize, a 20’ sculpture made from styrofoam wall insulation board; Mapping Itinerancy: Badger Creek, a photograph of a “relocatable space”; and Cathedral, an architectural intervention at the trailer site.