On cities, mapping, psychogeography and the experience of places.

Following the release of the eponymous book ¹, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London) ran A Mis-Guide to Anywhere in April 2006: four walking tours within the environs of the gallery, which unlike ordinary guided tours, are disrupted by the practice of “mytho-geography”, which places the fictional, fanciful, fragile and personal on equal terms with ‘factual’, municipal history. E.g. “Out of place” took people out for a walk of coincidences, derived from overlaying a map of Paris onto London.

¹ Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith and Cathy Turner (2006) A Mis-Guide to Anywhere. London: Wrights & Sites

I have had a renewed interested in travelogues, these narrated films or videos about travel, after watching Trans (2005) by Claudia Ruiz and Gijs Verkoulen. This film is a non-verbal 25-minute documentary – a “visual poem” – about a week-long journey by train from Moscow to Beijing, passing by extreme differences in countryside, travellers and natives. During this 7 day journey the viewer can experience how the eye and the mind unnoticeably accommodate to changing perspectives. “As time goes by shifting of railwaytracks and power lines get fascinating, you will get delirious as the Gobi dessert passes by and by”. Filmed traditionally at the beginning, then slowly and progressively becoming more of a mesmerizing aggregation of long tracking shots with little disturbance to challenge the alertness of the viewer.

Lars Arrhenius’ A-Z was first shown at PEER gallery (London) in 2002. The gallery also produced a book that borrowed its design from the popular London street guide. In this work, 18 characters evolve in scenarios through more than 250 illustrations arranged horizontally, vertically and diagonally against the backdrop of the London map and intersect in an apparent randomness.

The book adopts the non-linear grid reference format of a street atlas, thus highlighting the city’s fragmented nature. Like in Debord’s Naked City, The narrative potentiality of the city gives ground to a rewriting of the map, overlaying social narrative with geographical narrative. Despite holding imaged storylines and being bound, Arrhenius’s A-Z cannot be read as a book; it has no actual beginning of end. The reader is led into turning pages, back and forth, ‘up and down’, to follow each story, ‘traversing’ the map rather than following it.