About six months ago I spent a few weeks intensively researching the lost libraries of the Silk Road from my home in Cornwall, England. I wrote to countless academics, scoured museum websites, and eventually identified 16. That is, I found 16 names, histories, and basic locations. At that point, I drew a rough line across a map of the world and handed it to an agency who booked everything I’d need to get myself down this line. I had been awarded a rather astonishingly open-ended artist’s grant from a luxury manufacturer of automobiles and motorbikes, which only required of me to propose a journey, one which I intended to make by motorbike.