The phone has become an everyday interface for communicating and recording our surroundings, producing a continuous archive of place and time. Increasingly, this archive is interpreted for us: AI organizes images into categories such as collections, trips, people & pets, weaving accumulated photographs into ready-made narratives outside collective agency.

Drawing on Anhar Salem’s work with the Instagram audience of the Saudi Ethnographic Diary collective, Vsevolod Kazarin’s research on the everyday mobile photography practices of Ukrainian soldiers, and the artistic methodologies of media collective Froh! regarding self-publishing and archiving, “Pilgrimages Diary” invited Indiecon exhibitors to collectively produce a photographic-textual diary of their journey to Hamburg through a WhatsApp group chat.

Following Benedict Anderson’s concept of “pilgrimages” – journeys through which people from disparate peripheries move toward a shared center and, in doing so, come to recognize one another as part of a collective – the diary traces a contemporary and unequal pilgrimage. A couple of days before traveling, participants began contributing phone photographs, with or without captions. The group chat became both a space of communication and a collective diary, recording homes, streets, meals, hotels, stations, airports, waiting rooms, border crossings, visa checks, and, finally, arrival.

As these trajectories converge on Hamburg, the project asks why we meet here. Who travels toward whom, and under what conditions? How are journeys toward a shared cultural center shaped by geopolitical differences, particularly between the Global "North" and Global Majority?

Led by Vsevolod Kazarin, Anhar Salem, and Julian Peschel (Froh), in collaboration with creative technologists Giacomo Nanni and Fidel Thomet, the audience took part in a collective live-categorizing and printing performance. Together, they categorized photographs from the chat group, asking what different narratives of movement emerge when categorization becomes a collective rather than an automated process.

The chat history was simultaneously published as screenshots in an are.na channel, rearranged and printed as a collective publication, forming the material outcome of Pilgrimages.

Performing the Camera Roll is supported by the International Cultural Exchange Program of the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg.