#1 Klara Branting Paulsell
There’s no better way to learn how to drop your art-speak than sitting in a stranger’s car, knowing you’ll be there for a good chunk out of an afternoon, and the only payment you’re offering is a conversation. It doesn’t have to be the best conversation, but you’ve got no reason to not do your best. You’re just sitting there, watching the world pass by, and you get to ask whatever you like, you get to bring up any theory, any musings, any memory you like, and see how it flies. The catch is, you have to do it in A2 English. The deal is, they don’t know any of your references, not low nor high, not your hometown or your friend-group or that TV-show you watch, nor that philosopher, or that curator, or that sub-genre of a sub-genre from a revival of a sub-culture. And you don’t know theirs. Well, until that Doja Cat song plays and you’ve certainly both heard it before. But once you get talking, there’s so much you’re able to find out, together.
International Art English Version: Hitching a ride as an artistic method, sits somewhere between a useful metaphor, like a roadmap of how to really get out there and talk to people in the flavor of a times-gone-by nostalgia, and a useful metaphor in that other sense, the one where the idea is all that counts - the image of two people with different lives and different references who can still find that common denominator to communicate the very most basic. These two ideas, or these two ways to use the methodology of hitchhiking are deeply entangled with the ideal image of the commons, especially in this case, the common language. Of course, one can extricate the one from the other, but both the quasi-instigation and the mere elucidative device ultimately rely on the convivial gesture that this phrase denotes. A gesture that, by its very nature, implies a respite from the obfuscations of elite or even colloquial speech.
A2 version: Hitching a Ride can also be called hitchhiking. Hitchhiking is when you ask a stranger to let you ride with them in their car to somewhere they are already going. The price is only a conversation. Usually the conversation is in A2 English. The driver and the hitchhiker have different lives. They ask each other questions, and tell each other things in simple ways. Hitchhiking is a good way to learn how to talk about your work in a simple way.