A(mobile)DRIFT
​an occasional on-the-road dérive
between Philadelphia and Cochranville, Pennsylvania.
2019, 2024, 2025, 2026

NEXT DRIFT
September 19, 2026, 1-7pm
​Philadelphia <> Cochranville

Part of the 2026 Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Tickets here.

Our 2026 drift features Pablo Nez Garcia's 'Stroad Movie' and also coincides with the opening reception for Eco-Social Realism. Work by Eco-Social Realism artists Biomaterials Working Group will also be shared along the way.

A(mobile)DRIFT is an occasional Street Road participatory project of an observational drift between 'city' and 'country'.
​It adapts the Fluxus- and walking-art-inspired score City Centre from Ways to Wander (1), a collection of intriguing dérives.
​
First developed by artists Carol Maurer, Denise Holland, and Emily Artinian for Street Road at the Common Field Conference in Philadelphia in 2019, A(mobile)DRIFT sees its fourth iteration this September, 2026.
Participants ride together from Center City Philadelphia to Street Road, along the way making sketches, taking photographs, and writing observations, keeping in mind the score's prompts along the way:

City Centre
Cities tend to start in the middle and spread outwards, thinning as they go. Most of us know this journey. There is a familiar phenomenology of departure: leaving the centre behind, the built environment starts to slacken off and the skyline opens out; the compacted intricacy of the streets unravels; the density of traffic eases and inching progress gives way to longer surges of movement; the barrage of advertising and signage falls off; the noise drops a notch or two, perhaps a certain tension too. None of this is uniform; the geography of most cities is too complex for that. Headed the other way, the city gathers itself together again and the scales of things shifts upwards until at some point we can say we are more or less in the middle of things. But where is that exactly, and how can we be sure? 

Questions for the ride
How do I know I’m leaving it behind?
What is there more or less of; what has dropped away or become apparent; what has changed?
Whose route are we following?
Are we adrift?

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​Contributed by Tom Hall and edited by artists Clare Qualmann & Claire Hind, editors, Ways to Wander​

(1) ​Ways to Wander, Claire Hind and Clare Qualmann, Triarchy Press 2015

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A(mobile)DRIFT 2026

The fourth iteration of A(mobile)DRIFT is part of the 2026 Philadelphia Fringe Festival.

This year's drift includes an on-the-road screening of Pablo Nez Garcia’s 'Stroad Movie' (2025). It also coincides with the opening reception for the Street Road component of Eco-Social Realism, a regional exhibition series bringing together artworks exploring infrastructural and bioregional practices that visualise and embody the territorial scale of climate crisis — both its problems and its solutions.

Participants arrive in Cochranville, spend time with the artists in the exhibition, and return to Philadelphia by early evening. Work by Eco-Social Realism artists Biomaterials Working Group will also be shared along the way.
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A(mobile)DRIFT 2025

This third iteration of A(mobile)DRIFT was part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.
As the drifts Street Road runs relate loosely to concurrent programming, this year's event tied in to Becoming Succession the project that participants visited, having drifted together to Cochranville.  We arrived at Street Road for the opening reception for this exhibition — focused on Succession Fermentory and running for eight months, incorporating monthly workshops and talks. We included a foraging stop along the route during which participants gathered contributions to the exhibition. Keith Hartwig of Succession, who led the foraging explorations, writes:

As a Philadelphia expat now living (and making a living) on the edge of the sprawl, I frequently make the trip back and forth between the countryside and the city center. Once or twice a month, I transport farm crafted ferments from StellaLou Farm, where my brewery Succession Fermentory is located, to A Man Full of Trouble tavern in Society Hill, the fermentory's newly opened tavern. These seasonally crafted beverages, made exclusively with locally grown and wild foraged ingredients, are intended as encapsulations of the agricultural and ecological spirit of Southern Chester County and its surrounds. The flavors, textures and aromas imparted by these ingredients invite your senses to explore the terroir of this unique ecoregion and to ponder the interconnection of the domestic, wild, and feral. Drinking them in the context of the city, they also invite you, as does Qualmann & Hind's City Centre Score, to think about where cities end and the rural begins (or perhaps we can extrapolate more broadly, where the human and more-than-human begin and end) and how they become entangled with and disentangled from one another, producing hybrid and novel spaces and beings in the process. 
 
One thing I've often thought, and that the score aptly describes, is how the city doesn't really end, it just gradually thins and tapers off and not always uniformly. On the East Coast especially, in the sprawl of metropolises, the thinning and thickening of the urban is like a sine wave with peaks and valleys. The effect this has on wild spaces is that they too thicken and thin. Habitats are fractured into islands of various scales, from the sliver of a roadway medians to sprawling parks and conservation lands, and are interspersed and intertwined with the built environment. This creates many challenges for wildlife, cordoning species off and making movement treacherous (as the last artist at Street Road so caringly documented). It also creates opportunities for certain species to thrive, like those well suited to growing or living in fractured or disrupted environments. Foraging in this sprawl is one to engage with this fraught reality. Your senses bear witness to how species become isolated, ecosystems become fragmented, and human activity (pollution, encroachment, climate disruption) harms the environment and puts species at risk. Conversely, you also witness the resilience of life in these novel habitats — its ability to bridge the gaps between ecosystems by inhabiting and flourishing in liminal spaces and novel ecotones, and how human caretakers play a role in managing the urban-nature nexus. 
 
For this version of A(mobile)DRIFT, I invite you to join me as we explore a park on the edge of the city, in search of botanicals that will be used in a special brew to commemorate Becoming Succession, the new exhibit of work at Street Road Artist Space about a farm, a brewery, and a community connected through shared ecological principles and experiencing place based change, together.

DETAILS
1pm - 7pm, Saturday September 20, 2025

The tour begins at A Man Full of Trouble (127 Spruce St, Philadelphia, PA) at 1pm. We will depart promptly at 1pm; please arrive 10 minutes early.

The bus journey is approximately 1 hour and 15 to 1 hour and 30 minutes each way. Bathroom facilities are available at the exhibition venue, and the bus will be able to accommodate stops as needed. Approximately 2 hours will be spent at the exhibition space.

TO REGISTER
Register through The Philadelphia Fringe Festival 2025.

​Please do not hesitate to email us at [email protected] with any questions.

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CO-SPONSOR: Eco-Social Salon
We're very happy to share that this drift is co-sponsored by the Eco-Social Salon, Site-Seeing, and Screening Series, aka Eco-Social. This event series and learning community convenes seasonally in and around Philadelphia, where ecologically-themed artwork is presented and excursions taken. See https://ecosocialseries.wordpress.com/

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A(mobile)DRIFT 2024

September 7, 2024
Street Road's second iteration of this drift took place in September 2024, and, as previously, it bookended our then current exhibitions (Locust Leap, Various Small Envelopes, and Near Dwellers as Urbanites).

Contributions were installed next to those from 2019's A(mobile)DRIFT.

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A(mobile)DRIFT 2019

Participants' collected contributions from 'A(mobile)DRIFT' 2019.

​Contributions installed at Street Road.

Adding observations, en route.

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Further background

One of Street Road's ongoing areas of interest is the querying of spatio-social binarizations – that is, distinctions such as 'urban/rural', 'urban/suburban' and the like. While useful for some, like planners and polsters, these categories become engrained to the point that we become blind to things like the 'rural' in spaces seen as cities and towns (for example the complex worlds of urban other-than-human beings), as well as the extreme urbanization of most of our planet – now extending to the deep seas and low-Earth orbit, and even the moon and neighboring planets – in the form of nation-state and private claims on these spaces (most often for extractive, capital-driven, and damaging ends).

A(mobile)DRIFT is a space and process for moving through, considering, and re-considering these divisions and categorizations together. 

​The 2019 iteration of this work was created in connection to a panel convened by Street Road at the Common Field conference, description below. For further details about the panel, including presenters' notes, etc. contact us.​

Reconsidering Place: troubling the urban/rural binary for artist practices and organizations
Saturday, April 27, 2019 | 10–11:30 AM
Commonfield – Report from the Field
Organized by Emily Artinian and Fawn Daphne Plessner, Street Road with presentations by Emily Artinian, Fawn Daphne Plessner, Matthew Fluharty, and Emelie Chhangur. 

The field of art is framed by a normative belief that urban spaces constitute a ‘center’ of cultural endeavors and that rural spaces are at the ‘periphery’. This imaginary is increasingly challenged by concepts that ambiguate conventional understandings of the ‘urban’ and the ‘rural’, as well as framings such as the 'suburban' or 'exurban'.
 
Such designations do not capture the variegated social and cultural spaces that have become visible in recent decades, comprised as they are of axes of relationships and mobilities amongst multiple places and that also intersect with online spaces. Such designations also serve to reify place through colonial vocabularies and concepts and thereby reinforce not only the racialization and industrialization of space but also leave out important indigenous concepts and relations to place. They also sustain immobilities, even as mobility and access is increasingly assumed.

This session draws out speakers’ and attendees’ perspectives to examine working in multiple in-betweens, aiming to raise new questions about the cogency of claims to centrality and marginality.