Explorations into the Known World: Breton paddling

Image: Tony Roberts

Background to the explorations

The modern sea kayak is an unlikely vessel, a contemporary reinterpretation of a traditional Inuit seal hunting boat, now made of composite fibre rather than sealskin, but faithful to the original in design. It is a perfect symbol of the globalised world: it is an object which would never have come to exist without the changes and interactions inherent in the process of globalisation.

Now generally used as a leisure craft, there is a hard core of serious sea kayakers around the world who undertake marathon expeditions, gruelling open sea crossings, heroic high speed circumnavigations of remote islands, testing their own endurance to the limit.

My aim is to take a specially designed kayak and use it, rather than looking inward and testing my own endurance, to look outside myself and to explore the coastal regions of my own continent of Europe.

The explorers of the past set off into unmapped territory in search of material riches. Now the whole surface of the planet has been mapped, is theoretically known and the riches have already been partitioned out. But despite this the maps, reports and guidebooks, always slightly out of date even by the time they are printed, only show a single angle or a part of the whole picture.

I want to look deeper and try to make sense of a confusing world. I will be travelling back into apparently familiar regions and looking there, neither for unknown territories to claim, nor for slaves, spices or precious metals, but for an understanding of the world as it now exists, at this point on its trajectory in a constant process of change.

The kayak, from a practical point of view, is an ideal vessel for this exploration; it can travel to places inaccessible to larger boats and handle rougher sea conditions than other small craft, it moves a little faster than a walking pace, allowing time for observation and contemplation, it can slip unnoticed into the tiniest creeks and it has enough storage space in its hatches for the paddler to achieve total self sufficiency. At the same time its small size and unwieldiness on the land force the paddler to engage with other people in ways that a car or a yacht would not encourage. Its habitat is the marginal zone between land and sea, between water and air, between known and unknown.

It is the physical reality of this border zone and the people who inhabit it that I hope to come to understand, and through that understanding, to make sense of Europe at the dawn of the 21st Century.

Explorations into the Known World

Thursday, 3 September 2009

Breton paddling

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Venice Trieste

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