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

This one-off 10-day exhibition opened in December 2006 in Bargehouse (London’s South Bank) and was curated by the Light Surgeons.
The four-storey building – a dilapidated, raw warehouse – the ligthing and atmosphere of the space lent themselves marvelously to the purpose of the show, “a journey to examine how we move through, interact with, and share the built environment”.

Spanning the interconnected themes of travelling, inhabiting cities, private/public space, the event featured audio/video installations by the Light Surgeons, talks by Scanner, Iain Sinclair on his last book ‘London, City of disappearances’, and film screenings from Onedotzero’s own ‘Digital Terrains’ programme. A couple of film/video pieces by Lenka Clayton & James Price particularly grabbed my attention: ‘conversation’, where two TV monitors playback interviews of passers-by making a judgement upon each other on the basis of appearance, thus giving a peculiar insight – not least funny – of people’s untold perceptions of each other; In the series of films ‘People in Order’, the film-makers intentionally set filming ‘rules’ contained in the title: In ‘Age’ they shot 100 people in their home, telling their age, shown in order. This was followed by ‘Relationship’, ‘Wealth’… offering as many original and alternative ways to go about documenting people and their environment.

The show also explored the dimension of travel, with some very interesting works by the Light Surgeons – one travelogue video showing upstairs, and the installation ‘transit’ on the ground floor, featuring a full-scale airport terminal hall with its luggage carrousel and passengers’ voices listing the contents of their luggage.
As Chris Thomas Allen (from the Light Surgeons) puts it: “The moment you arrive you have departed. As you leave you have begun a new experience. The fluid movements of our arrivals and departures map threads of intertwined experiences in transitory space. Within the pockets of personal space we carry memories, aspirations and secrets. These resonant whispers mark our personal cartographies in the public realm.”

www.articulatedlondon.org

In his text The Theory of Dérive (1956), Guy Debord seeked to convince the reader to let emotions resonate when looking at and experiencing urban spaces; The Dérive – the French word for an aimless stroll – institutes the city as a network of narratives, of experiences and events. Space itself becomes the product of inhabiting. “To dérive is to notice the way in which certain areas, streets, or buildings resonate with states of mind, inclinations, and desires, and to seek out reasons for movement other than those for which an environment was designed. It is very much a matter of using an environment for one’s own ends, seeking not only the marvellous beloved by surrealism but bringing an inverted perspective to bear on the entirety of the spectacular world.” ¹

The Dérive is somewhat related to Flânerie, a word coined in the mid-eighteenth century by the French poet Charles Baudelaire to describe the typically Parisian leisurely exploration of city streets by pedestrians, detached observers of the industrial metropolis. The Dérive can also be likened to the surrealist street adventures of André Breton ², in which night promenades in the city are raised by a succession of dreamlike impressions and romantic fantasies.

¹ Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationst INternational in a Postmodern Age. London and New York : Routledge, 1992.

² André Breton, Nadja . Paris : Gallimard, 1927.

“What would happen if street corners could talk? Some people believe that bricks and mortar can record sound vibration – that if you could unlock this you would be able to hear the history of the area played back to you.”

Daniel Belasco Rogers spent months recording stories told by local residents of the Greenwich area. In August 2006, the “Peninsula Voices” project will find out what stories are written through the pavements, using handheld computers connected by GPS, making it possible to walk round the area and hear the voices of those who lived there.

www.planbperformance.net/dan

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

When writing Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, Guy Debord was seeking a new way of life in the observation of certain processes of chance and predictability in the streets:

“The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground); the appealing or repelling character of certain places – these phenomena all seem to be neglected.” ¹

Debord observed how he could extract urban areas that had been drawn through and delineated by the emotional and behavioural responses to those spaces that conformist town-planning would ignore. His psychogeographic map entitled “The Naked City” (illustration) shows the fragmented experience of pedestrian wanderings, where meaning is found through walking the streets instead of motoring through them, where it is the pedestrian who creates a mental ordering of the cityscape instead of the city forcefully imposing its structure upon the individual character of these experiences.

¹ Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, in Les Lèvres Nues # 6, September 1955