Rose’s “suitcases of trouble” would be the perfect travel accessory for beautiful & rootless losers, but as far as I can tell they’re not for sale except as objects of art, putting them out of range of those without permanent employment.

But they’re a call, to me at least, to rethink the humble suitcase. If you follow Rose’s lead and customize your case, you’d have no trouble recognizing it on the baggage carousel. That it would get chipped and trashed would only add to its damaged beauty.

Here’s an interview with Aaron Rose.

“These days,” he says, “with companies having more of an incentive for creative thinking–to find their way out of the financial crisis–any company that’s interested in creativity should be looking at people who have had these [live abroad] experiences.”

Scientific American reports briefly on the link between living abroad and creativity, but if you want the real deal, download the 15-page paper, Cultural Borders and Mental Barriers: The Relationship Between Living Abroad and Creativity, wade through the academic language, and revel in yet another reason to head for Croatia or Chad or Costa Rica.

Many artists do their best work abroad
The paper cites 5 separate studies, and mentions that “living abroad is often seen as a necessary experience for aspiring artists” and that “some creative individuals produce their best known masterworks during or following a stint abroad (e.g., Vladimir Nabokov and his novel Lolita, Ernest Hemingway and his The Sun Also Rises). In fact, all four winners of the Nobel Prize in literature who are from Ireland (Yeats, Shaw, Beckett, and Heaney) spent significant portions of their lives abroad. In addition to writers, many famous painters, (e.g., Gauguin and Picasso) and composers (e.g., Handel, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg) created many of their most admired works while living in foreign countries.”

Three ways living abroad stimulates creativity

According to the paper,
1. Living abroad gives you access to a greater number of novel ideas and concepts, which then act as inputs for the creative process.

2. Living abroad allows people to approach problems from different perspectives. For example, in some cultures (e.g., China), leaving food on one’s plate is an implicit sign of appreciation, implying that the host has provided enough to eat. In other countries (e.g., the United States) the same behavior may often be taken as an insult, a condemnation of the quality of the meal.

3. Experiences in foreign cultures can increase the psychological readiness to accept and recruit ideas from unfamiliar sources, thus facilitating the processes of unconscious idea recombination and conceptual expansion.

And while I agree with all of that, the ponderous language of the study makes me want to blurt out, Yeah, and living abroad is also good FUN!

The Alice heading for Venice. Photo by Tod Seelie.

Don’t know how to get there from here? Feel like you’re not invited to the party? Low on raw materials?

Do what Brooklyn artist Swoon is doing: crashing the Venice Biennale (a major contemporary art exhibition) on boats made entirely of trash. Swoon and her proudly motley crew of dumpster-diving anarchist artists landed in Slovenia with a container of New York garbage, raw ingredients for the boats that will take them across the Adriatic to Venice. Think Water World meets Mad Max.

http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/57181/

The crew cools off on the way to Venice. Photo by Tod Seelie.