Urban Exploration Doc 1
This is a film I made after some adventures underground with Steve Duncan (undercity.org) last summer. We also have a teaser video which you can watch on my vimeo page (vimeo.com/5752275).
Steve and I just completed another underground expedition with Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erling_Kagge). It was featured in a three page article on the front page of the NY Times metro section and was written by Alan Feuer (nytimes.com/2011/01/02/nyregion/02underground.html)
Audio Walks
¨The format of the audio walks is similar to that of an audioguide. You are given a CD player or Ipod and told to stand or sit in a particular spot and press play. On the CD you hear my voice giving directions, like “turn left here” or “go through this gateway”, layered on a background of sounds: the sound of my footsteps, traffic, birds, and miscellaneous sound effects that have been pre-recorded on the same site as they are being heard. This is the important part of the recording. The virtual recorded soundscape has to mimic the real physical one in order to create a new world as a seamless combination of the two. My voice gives directions but also relates thoughts and narrative elements, which instills in the listener a desire to continue and finish the walk.
All of my walks are recorded in binaural audio with multi-layers of sound effects, music, and voices (sometimes as many as 18 tracks) added to the main walking track to create a 3D sphere of sound. Binaural audio is a technique that uses miniature microphones placed in the ears of a person. The result is an incredibly lifelike 3D reproduction of sound. Played back on a headset, it is almost as if the recorded events were taking place live.¨
Janet Cardiff, from The Walk Book
Ruta de la Memoria Colectiva
Ruta de la Memoria Colectiva: monumentos, esculturas y espacio público
El Instituto Distrital de Patrimonio Cultural invita a toda la ciudadanía a que se inscriba y participe en la Ruta de Memoria Colectiva, un recorrido gratuito por lugares y personajes históricos del Centro de Bogotá.
La idea es generar una mirada sobre el espacio público del Centro y su transformación, a partir de una selección de obras que lo adornan, habitan, modifican, embellecen, cuestionan y resignifican.
El itinerario busca dar a conocer los monumentos y esculturas en su dimensión histórica, simbólica y urbana, así como generar resonancias con las apuestas del Plan de Revitalización del Centro Tradicional, actualmente en proceso de formulación y liderado por el IDPC.
Fecha: Viernes 2-9-16-23 y 30 de noviembre de 2012
Hora: 3:00 p.m. a 6:00 p.m. hora para cada recorrido.
RECORRIDO BOLÍVAR
Fecha: 16 y 30 de noviembre
Hora: 3:00 p.m. a 6:00 p.m.
Punto de encuentro: En la estatua de Bolívar-Plaza de Bolívar
Secuencia del recorrido:
1–Plaza de Bolívar
2-Rufino José Cuervo (calle 10 cra 6 y 7)
3-Bosque Cultural (Luis Ángel Arango)
4-Minerva (Luis Ángel Arango)
5-Camilo Torres (cra 13, calles 14 y 15)
6-Chorro de Quevedo (calle 13, cra 2)
RECORRIDO SANTANDER
Fecha: 9 y 23 de noviembre
Punto de encuentro: En la estatua de Santander-Parque Santander (Carrera 7 con calle 16)
Hora: 3:00 p.m. a 6:00 p.m.
Secuencia del recorrido:
1-Francisco José de Caldas (Plaza de Caldas-Cra 7, calle 20)
2-Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada (Plazoleta Universidad del Rosario)
3-Dinamismo (Procuraduría General – Cra 5, calle 15)
4-Templete del Libertador (Parque de los Periodistas)
5-Policarpa Salavarrieta (cra 3, calle 18)
Recorridos a cargo de Alvaro Moreno Hoffmann
Artista Interdisciplinario e investigador en temas de espacio público y movilidad alternativa.
Profesor del Taller de “Recorridos Urbanos” y de la cátedra de “Pensamiento Arte” en el Departamento de Artes Visuales de la Universidad Javeriana. Profesor del Taller de “Acciones y Lugares” en el Departamento de Arte de la Universidad de los Andes. Editor y traductor del libro Arqueología de los Medios de Siegfried Zielinski publicado por Ediciones Uniandes en 2012. Pionero del Arte Público en Bogotá y explorador de formas alternativas de recorrer el espacio urbano a pie y el paisaje rural en bicicleta. 20 años de experiencia en recorridos a través de la ciudad y de los cerros circundantes.
El Dorado
“El extranjero que, después de un largo y costoso viaje, llega a la Sabana de Bogotá experimenta, antes que todo, una justificada sorpresa. Se ha dicho con acierto que la impresión que recibe una persona en tales circunstancias debe de parecerse a lo que se sentiría al pasar rapidísimamente de una selva del centro de Africa a una llanura de la Normandía. ¿Cómo es posible que tan penosos caminos conduzcan a una de las más importantes ciudades de Suramérica, donde habitan tantas personas ricas y cultas y donde se acumulan tantos capitales y tantos tesoros del espíritu? Ya en esto se muestra que Colombia es un país de violentos contrastes. Estos contrastes se hacen visibles en su misma configuración física, en las variedades climáticas, en las diferencias raciales, en su desarrollo etnográfico y político.”
“Bogotá se halla a 4°36’6″ de latitud Norte y a 67°34’8” de longitud Este del meridiano de París. La diferencia entre Bogotá y París es de cinco horas, seis minutos y diecisiete segundos. Bogotá es la capital de la República y, al propio tiempo, del Estado de Cundinamarca. Este último nombre, de origen indio, parece significar “región alta donde impera el cóndor o el águila”. De este modo quisieron los habitantes primitivos designar a los conquistadores la Sabana de Bogotá y el imperio de los chibchas.”
“En el centro de la ciudad se halla la Plaza de Bolívar, o de la Constitución, un cuadrado de 80 metros de lado. En medio se alza la muy lograda estatua en bronce del gran Simón Bolívar, el libertador (f 1830). Tenerani modeló en Europa esta escultural. En torno al monumento se han dispuesto unos bellas jardines, donde crecen flores durante todo el año. La plaza ofrece un excelente aspecto. Por el Este la limita la Catedral, de amplia fachada y con dos torres, coronada por una cúpula.”
“Ante la Catedral y a lo largo de todo el frente oriental de la Plaza de Bolívar, corre una especie de terraza a la que se asciende por escalones. Es el Altozano, lugar de encuentro y mentidero de todos los políticos y charlatanes de la ciudad.”
“Quien contempla la ciudad desde un camino que discurre a unos cien metros de la misma, no puede sustraerse a una sensación de melancolía ante la vista de aquella confusión de tejados, de aquel apiñamiento de calles, de plazas relativamente pequeñas. En verdad, la distancia entre esto y nuestras abiertas y claras ciudades europeas produce un efecto de opresión. Pero la situación de Bogotá tiene también sus bellezas. En particular la luz que da sobre la cadena montañosa que se desploma hacia el valle, es muy cambiante a cualquier hora del día y constituye un verdadero deleite para la mirada del suizo. A veces se ofrece el mismo espectáculo de luces que es propio del verano en nuestro país, cuando los montes parecen retirarse y se presentan menos fuertemente modelados. Otras veces, hacia la caída del sol, las alturas se envuelven en un particular ambiente otoñal, y las formas de los peñascos destacan nítidas como los Alpes en los días septembrinos. Y otras veces, también, las montañas respiran frescura primaveral y apacible resplandor de mayo. Esta variedad de las luces, que en Bogotá puede gozarse en el espacio de un solo día, mientras que en nuestras tierras se halla repartida en las diferentes estaciones del año, desagravia en cierto modo a los montes por la pérdida del adorno de sus árboles, total y bárbaramente talados, y también por lo mezquino de la vegetación que los viste apenas de una delgada capa verde.”
“Las jóvenes bogotanas de raza blanca que encontramos cuando van de compras o a la iglesia, pueden calificarse, en su mayoría, de muy hermosas. Son pequeñas, pero de elegante figura, la que, sin embargo, no se manifiesta suficientemente, debido a que la bogotana viste por la calle de modo muy sencillo; y de negro. Sus atavíos más lujosos los reservan para el salón o el teatro. Del torso a la cabeza, a veces envolviendo a ésta enteramente, cumple su cometido la inevitable mantilla, frecuentemente ornada de preciosos encajes, y cuyos delicados pliegues insinúan lo inaccesible, accesible al propio tiempo, de su condición. A través de esta negra veladura, mira el expresivo rostro. El cutis de las auténticas bogotanas, cuyas familias residen desde mucho tiempo en la capital, es pálido, transparente y mate. Las muchachitas cuyos padres se desplazaron del campo a la ciudad desde hace una o dos generaciones, se distinguen por sus mejillas rojas y de suma delicadeza, que florecen como rosas sobre la tez blanca. Los ojos, siempre fascinadoramente bellos, amables y un algo burlones, son castaños o negros y muy brillantes. Las trigueñas y las rubias abundan menos.”
”
Mucha menos atención dedica el forastero a los pobres indios de raza pura, atraído principalmente por la contemplación de la gente blanca o mestiza. El forastero siente instintivamente que se encuentra, más que frente a seres individuales, frente a una masa que gusta de deslizarse lo más silenciosa y humildemente. El indio, “civilizado” y “convertido” al cristianismo, lleva toscos calzones de un tejido de fabricación casera. Su camisa está casi siempre sucia. Sobre ella viste la ruana, prenda cuadrada, fuerte y de color oscuro, con una abertura en medio, por donde se introduce la cabeza (el poncho mejicano). El indio va descalzo o lleva una especie de sandalias (alpargates). Predominan los hombres de constitución fuerte, de tez de tono cobrizo o aceitunado, cabello lacio y corto, escasa o ninguna barba y ojos vivos que expresan su carácter astuto, algo indolente y muy desconfiado. Las indias jóvenes raramente rebasan la estatura mediana, pero tienen bastante buena figura, si bien son algo toscas y torpes. Los rasgos y expresión del rostro presentan caracteres de gran regularidad y hasta de hermosura, y el pelo, aunque no muy cuidado, es bello y negrísimo. Su indumento es de lo más sencillo; el torso se cubre con una simple camisa, o a veces con una tosca mantilla negra.
En la ciudad las indias trabajan como sirvientas y lavanderas, y entonces van mejor vestidas y más limpias. Pero las viejas presentan un aspecto de lamentable abandono y de suma fealdad.
A los indios se les ve en los barrios extremos, agrupados a docenas en algunas de las muchas tabernas o tiendas, de pie junto al mostrador tomando la bebida popular, la chicha, un líquido amarillo y espeso, parecido al vino nuevo y hecho de maíz fermentado; es de fuertes efectos embriagantes. A veces los vemos conduciendo por la ciudad sus mulas, éstas bajo el peso de grandes cargas. Otros llevan a cuestas jaulones con gallinas o cargamentos de leña, carbón u otras mercancías. El correspondiente fardo lo sujetan con una correa que se apoya sobre la frente. Curvados, con un paso ligero y corto como un trotecillo, caminan hacia la plaza del mercado, donde constituyen el elemento humano más numerosos y donde se muestran en su ambiente y algo más desenvueltos. El ruido que reina allí se parece al zumbido de un colmena.”
El Dorado – Ernest Rothlisberger S.XIX
The Art of Urban Exploration
“rights to the city” and “writing the city”
“…experimental modes of exploration can play a vital role in the development of critical approaches to
the cultural geographies of cities.”
“There’s no such thing as public space. The only public space is your home.”
NYPD cop
David Pinder
Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London
“The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.”
—Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 1967
The Right to the City
Urbanization, we may conclude, has played a crucial role in the absorption of capital surpluses, at ever increasing geographical scales, but at the price of burgeoning processes of creative destruction that have dispossessed the masses of any right to the city whatsoever. The planet as building site collides with the ‘planet of slums’
Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant (PDF)
MAGICAL URBANISM
“A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.”
– Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Urban Exploration
Place Hacking: tales of urban exploration
“In his 2005 book Access all Areas, an urban explorer who wrote under the nom de plume Ninjalicious described urban exploration and infiltration (more colloquially known as UrbEx or UE) as “an interior tourism that allows the curious-minded to discover a world of behind-the-scenes sights”. Ninjalicious is largely credited as the individual who first penned the phrases “urban exploration” and “infiltration” to describe what Troy Paiva has more recently called the discovery and exploration of T.O.A.D.S., temporary, obsolete, abandoned or derelict spaces. More specifically, urban explorers recreationally trespass into derelict industrial sites, closed hospitals, abandoned military installations, sewer and drain networks, transportation and utility networks, shuttered businesses, foreclosed estates, mines, construction sites, cranes, bridges and bunkers, among other places.
Urban explorers come from a wide swath of nations and vocations, all connected primarily by their interest in adventure and the preference for embodied experience over analysis or representation, seemingly in contrast to their obvious proficiency with visual media. Through networks of practitioners operating under pseudonyms and false identities, the urban exploration scene is mysterious, secretive, exclusionary and, as I will show through my ethnographic work with the community, a deeply rooted community full of rare camaraderie. A web of rich stories has formed in London from 2008-2011 with a group who refused, despite eventually very severe consequences and repercussions, to let adventure, mystery and desire wither in a world rendered increasingly mundane through what many of them see as the commercialisation and securitisation of the city.
At the same time, working deeply within the community has revealed a strain of libertarian ideology, grounded in a desire for personal freedom, that also celebrates the neoliberal construction of the monolithic, all capable subject and complicates a superficial understanding of this “movement” as simply a response to the neoliberalisation of the city. The argument that I want to put forward here is that urban explorers, in the hacking tradition, hack or exploit fractures in physical architecture and social expectations in an effort to find deeper meanings and different readings in places even as they preference process over results. This practice, rather than being strictly oppositional, is actually quite celebratory; it is a method of affecting desire through unencumbered play that creates a meld between body and city, representations and practice, explorers and place and, of course, between fellow trespassers.” Read the rest here…
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
-T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding
From Bradley Garret’s Place Hacking Blog
Construction of Place in Art
“Marching Piece” performance by George Maciunas. Flux Snow Event, New Marlborough (Massachusetts), 1977.
“Contemporary artworks have addressed space in a variety of ways, often subtly and thought-provokingly, yet these important interconnections between art and spatial conceptions have not always been adequately recognised or explored in depth. As both an art critic and an art practitioner, Marta Traquino advances an original reflection on the construction, use and meaning of space in contemporary art. Indeed, Ms Traquino’s book illuminates a series of significant visible and invisible similarities between, on the one hand, a series of geographic and social theoretical conceptions of space and place and, on the other, a series of artworks belonging to the traditions of installation, performance, site-specific artworks and what is commonly, although vaguely, referred to as ‘public art’. In this context, the notion of ‘public’ plays a crucial role. Examining quite a few art exhibitions and events, one notices in them a complex co-presence of a ‘space of the public’, i.e. the space occupied by the audience (which includes how the artwork ‘reaches out’ the audience, and how the latter relates or reacts to the artwork), and a ‘public space’, i.e. the heterogeneous, visible and living space that hosts the art event, in which the artwork locates itself and upon which it seeks to act.” more
About the author as critic:
História da Arte: Marta Traquino
Da Construção do Lugar pela Arte Contemporânea I
Da Construção do Lugar pela Arte Contemporânea II – Do espaço ao lugar: Fluxus
Da Construção do Lugar pela Arte Contemporânea III – A arte como um estado de encontro
About the author as artist:
Que cor tem agora o céu?
Guest Artist – Marta Traquino
What colour has the sky got now?
On the Road Again
Canned Heat plays “On the Road Again” life at Montreaux jazz Festival 1973
CounterTourism
COUNTER-TOURISM: An important statement
WHAT?
If you’ve ever been a tourist, then Counter-Tourism is an invitation to you to completely transform your experience of the heritage-tourism industry and its many sites. Counter-Tourism provides a set of powerful lenses, bending a whole world of conventional tourism into a spiral of new perspectives and experiences.
HOW? (The Strategy)
Together, ordinary people can change the world of heritage-tourism by innovative consuming, intervention and even ‘infiltration’ that will transform the way that the heritage industry and its sites are visited, looked at, experienced, conserved, managed and changed.
Counter-Tourism can only take off and come alive if you use the tactics (set out in the Pocketbook and the Handbook) and encourage others to do so, devising new ones along the way.
WHY?
Because, like the moon, the heritage business has a dark side! Beneath those simple sounding stories in the Visitor Guide and behind the locked gates marked PRIVATE in heritage sites, there lies a multitude of inconvenient stories, hilarities, wonders, absurdities, extremes and entertaining outrages. When Counter-Tourism opens the doors, tourism becomes a funny, shocking, revelatory, subversive and adventurous life-changing experience rather than a deferential procession through the unrevealing homes and castles of Heritage plc. Counter-Tourism upsets the sanitising and bowdlerising efforts of the heritage industry: our counter-intention is to ensure that we do get unduly excited!
BUT…
… that’s just for starters. If you’re willing to try, counter-tourism is also a personal and social journey of mini-pilgrimages, challenges and pleasures that points the way to a world where all our heritages and histories will be in play.
WHERE (is all this going)?
To a new way of understanding and making history – through pleasure and exploration – a whole new terrain where history and heritage and nation and identity are no longer carefully policed stories, but are landscapes to be explored, crime scenes to be examined, sensual playgrounds in which to learn new tricks.
HOLD ON – IS THERE AN AGENDA HERE?
O yes. No secret about that – the agenda is an approach to place and space that celebrates the multiplicities of meanings in every heritage venue and upsets all the heritage industry’s attempts at meaning-control and homogenisation – you can call it “mythogeography”, it’s what gives counter-tourism its special emphasis on the sites of heritage, on the places themselves.
WHO?
In the end, counter-tourism is down to you. There are hundreds of tips, tactics and hints here – but they’re just there to support you as you use your own intuitions, follow your noses and write your own histories. Choose how far you want to go and take what you want from the Pocketbook, the Handbook and this site. Now, let’s begin the journey…
HOW?
- By intensifying and sharpening your perceptions – seeing what’s behind the scenes, what’s just outside the site, what’s just offstage.
- By blowing apart the homogenous heritage story to uncover, the multiplicity of stories.
- By changing the kind of tourist you are.
- By making tiny or dramatic interventions, and then maybe moving on, if it’s your bag, to ‘openly infiltrating’ the industry itself.
Mythogeography
At its simplest, Mythogeography is a way of walking, thinking and organising on many levels at the same time. Anyone can do it. You can do it. Walking becomes a performance, walkers become performers and the route becomes their co-star.
In a city, for example, walkers become aware of their urban home as a site, a forum, a playground and a stage: all there to enjoy, understand and provoke on multiple levels:
- Shops, houses, streets
- Tourist sites, visitor centres, museums, heritage industry
- Visible archaeology and history
- Community/social/collective ambitions, hopes, disappointments, failures
- Personal memories and recollections
- Invisible and forgotten history
- Concealed history (crime, disease, squalor)
- Childhoods, loves, hates
- Myths, legends and rumours
- Private dreams, imaginings and fantasies
The levels of the city are reflected back in the many levels of the walker – the public and the private, fact and dream, admissible and inadmissible, forgotten and remembered, past and future.
Explore www.mythogeography.com for more on the subject of Mythogeography, drifting, drive, Phil Smith and Crab Walks.
Mythogeography – The Book – is:
2 parts story
This section is the gloriously funny and endlessly fascinating account of the author’s recent journey on foot across the north of England in the footsteps of a man who made the same journey 100 years ago sowing acorns in the company of a dog called Pontiflunk.
Read a snippet
1 part handbook
The “handbook of drifting” and the “orrery” later in the book have ideas on walking like a stalker, like a swimmer, like a ghost, like an explorer, like a pilgrim… and that’s just the start. Learn about how to organise your own procession, the philosophy of walking, crabs in society, UFOs in Devon, Uri Geller, the political geography of cities, the madness of municipal history and much, much more (as they say).
Read another snippet
As the author puts it:
From the transnational pilgrim to the person who ‘drifts off’ on the way to the shops, Mythogeography addresses the means, uses and consequences of ‘walking sideways’, of deploying the ordinary act of walking as a lever to prise the lid off everyday life.
This book is not entirely conventional. It consists of an assemblage of sometimes unreliable, sometimes fractious documents hung around a flawed, yet epic tale of a journey in search of oak trees. It floats numerous narratives around this travelogue, weaving a matrix of possible trajectories for the reader from passive contemplation to wild pilgrimage and activist pedestrianism. The book’s second half contains advice, tasks, guidance, kits and mental maps: a toolbag of information and suggestions for the reader who wants to take the next step. Mixing entrepreneurial drive, rambling discourses and post-dramatic performance with soft architecture and post-politics-politics, Mythogeography is a guide to strolling in the cracks in the pavement and a means to walking out on the Spectacle.
Scroll up to buy the book. Drift off to visit the Mythogeography wonderland website.
About the Author
Phil Smith was one of the organisers of the first symposium on Mythogeography in October 2008 at the University of Plymouth, where he was, until recently, a Senior Research Associate and where he is now beginning three years’ funded research making and studying ‘interventions in touristic and heritage space’.
He says of himself:
‘The Crab Man’, Phil Smith, is a middle-aged, gadfly academic and artist currently based in and around Exeter. He admits to having struggled with the vagaries of making politics as a form of performance and to having experimented at length with performances in unusual sites. He also says that he intends to develop walking as a generator for extreme pleasure and a means of activism and resistance.
There’s a short film of him here and more about him here. There’s loads of information on Wrights and Sites (the group of site-specific artist-researchers to which he subscribes) here. That’s enough isn’t it? He’s a proper Renaissance Crab, OK?
Audio Intervention
“Das Stueck (Intervention)‘ verwebt als Audio-Inszenierung Erfahrungen des Lesens, Beobachtens und Hörens. Mit Kopfhörern, MP3-Playern und der Publikation mischen sich die ZuschauerInnen unter das Leben eines öffentlichen Platzes. Sie fahnden nach den Spuren einer nur vorgestellten Gemeinschaft, verpassen sie immer wieder und werden zu deren eigentlichen ProtagonistInnen.”
‚Die Institution‘ existiert nur in der Vorstellung. Ihre Handlungen und alle in ihr handelnden Personen sind frei erfunden. Jegliche Ähnlichkeit mit lebenden Personen oder realen Institutionen wäre rein zufällig.
Hearing Helmets
“ARTTOURS invite you to take one of Mirja Wellmann’s ‚hearing helmets’ for a walk through Stuttgart, slowly inverting the focus of your sonic attention, until the body and city become one.”
“Mirja Wellmann’s Hearing Helmets offer an alternative way of listening to the city. They shield the protagonist, filtering, dampening and distorting our experience of space. After a period of time the listener becomes sensitised to the sounds made by their own body, as each step increases the intensity of our breathing, creaking, slurping, snuffling and crunching self. A hearing helmet generates a physical presence for something that is usually described as immaterial.”
Mirja Wellmann studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including bursaries with the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg, the Rhein-Neckar-Kreises in Heidelberg, the Ceaac in Straßburg and the Künstlerhaus in Stuttgart. Wellmann’s approach to sculpture incorporates the act of hearing with plastic sculptural forms and spatial manuscripts. Her work has been presented in the Klangkunstgalerie tube München, at the international Sound-Art Festival in Köln, in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Reuchlinhaus Pforzheim and the Kunsthalle Göppingen. Mirja Wellmann lives and works in the Schwäbischen Alb in Münsingen (Baden-Württemberg).
A Walk wih Amy
”
At an agreed time Amy Sharrocks in London calls you on your mobile telephone number. Together you take each other on a 30-minute tour of your respective locations. You collaborate to choose which way to go, describing the places and people you encounter and the surroundings you find yourselves in. Guiding each other’s footsteps, the conversations are as open-ended as the walks are.
‘A walk with Amy’ functions as an urban drift, in which each participant is simultaneously a spectator and traveling companion, tourist and tour operator. The intimacy of an unknown voice can lead to unexpected insights and connections, noticing details we might have overseen, as we share cities across a remote landscape. ‘A walk with Amy’ asks what is worthy of attention – without road names or landmarks, what will function as signposts and how will we make our choices?”
”
Satellites around separate cities.
“Let us go now, you and I…”
At an agreed time Amy Sharrocks in London calls you on your mobile telephone number. Together you take each other on a 30-minute tour of your respective locations. You collaborate to choose which way to go, describing the places and people you encounter and the surroundings you find yourselves in. Guiding each other’s footsteps, the conversations are as open-ended as the walks are.
‘A walk with Amy’ functions as an urban drift, in which each participant is simultaneously a spectator and traveling companion, tourist and tour operator. The intimacy of an unknown voice can lead to unexpected insights and connections, noticing details we might have overseen, as we share cities across a remote landscape. ‘A walk with Amy’ asks what is worthy of attention – without road names or landmarks, what will function as signposts and how will we make our choices?
Each walk will take approximately 30 minutes.”
Meeting point in front of the Linden Museum, Hegelplatz 1, 70174 Stuttgart
Walking as Knowing as Making
“The WALKING EXCHANGE is an online discussion that parallels the WALKING AS KNOWING AS MAKING symposium. The exchange is intended specifically to engage contemporary artists and groups who employ walking (and, more generally, touring) as a critical tool to investigate and destabilize essentialized notions of place and landscape. Our hope is that this dialogue will both inform and be informed by the symposium as it unfolds here at the University of Illinois. The symposium and the online exchange are both experimental by nature – attempts to creatively bridge a multitude of divergent contexts in a way that blends and recombines theoretical and practiced approaches to walking as a subject.
Walking as art, as writing, as pilgrimage, as protest / Walking as spiritual, as mundane / Walking as constituting boundaries, as transgressing boundaries / Walking as deeply personal, as emphatically public / Walking as touring, as witnessing / Walking as practical, as impractical / Walking as compliance, as defiance / Walking as seeing, as being seen / Walking as traditional, as revolutionary / Walking as wild, as mediated, as constructed / Walking as an interpretive act, a generative act, an embodied act / Walking as differentiating space, as consolidating space / Walking in space and time, connecting space, connecting time…”
Today it is possible to construct a history of walking as a form of urban intervention that inherently contains the symbolic meanings of the primal creative act: roaming as architecture of the landscape, where the term landscape indicates the action of symbolic as well as physical transformation of anthropic space…. The aim is to indicate walking as an aesthetic tool capable of describing and modifying those metropolitan space that often have a nature still demanding comprehension, to be filled with meanings rather than designed and filled with things. Walking then turns out to be a tool which, precisely due to the simultaneous reading and writing of space intrinsic to it, lends itself to attending to and interacting with the mutability of those spaces, so as to intervene in their continuous becoming by acting in the field, in the here and now of their transformation, sharing from the inside in the mutations of these spaces that defy the conventional tools of contemporary design.
From > Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice / Francesco Careri
Do you like walking?
Walking as a facilitator for conversation, thinking and producing ideas interests us. We walk all the time.
Project Manager: Walks of Life
Applications deadline: Wednesay 24 October 2012
Walks of Life is the development of a new walking appreciation institute that brings walking, art and other life enhancing activities together in the community of Huntly and beyond.
Deveron Arts / the town is the venue is looking for a dynamic and motivated Project Manager to drive this project. The Project Manager will be responsible for both the administrative running of the programme and the development of this new organisation and its events programme.
We are looking for people with a proven interest and relevant experiences in walking and art. Experience required in outdoor activities, tourism and social enterprise development, as well as art administration, fundraising, event organisation and critical engagement.
Duration: until 31 March 2014. Base: Huntly, Aberdeenshire.
Fee: £30000 per annum / The Town is the Venue artocracy (PDF)
The Tour
“The Tour / By e-Xplo
It is a difficult assignment, to trace how one arrives at a particular strategy or medium, and the task is made more difficult because of the collaborative nature of our work.
Touring is more than just a metaphor for the “society of the spectacle” or for the increasing industrialization and mobilization of culture for economic purposes.
The tour conjures more than tourism; it implicates and puts into play numerous forms of movement, across and between borders, not just of people but of images, of sounds, of resources, of capital, of labor, of cultures.
The tour can be a pointed critique or a reflexive method of involving/implicating ourselves within the physical and discursive terrain of frames such as public art, site specificity, sound art, mobility, land art, sculpture, architecture, film, music or performance.
It can also be seen as a tactical response to the increased policing of “public” space, in which walking or wandering gets redressed as trespassing or loitering.
It can also be said that the tour is linked to previous politically motivated artists who have taken to the streets, such as Andre Breton (Surrealists) with his strategy of objective chance or Guy Debord (Situationists), who proposed derive (“a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences”) as a method for studying terrain, emotionally disorienting oneself, as well as an intermediate step toward the realization of a larger field of study of psycho-geography, fostering among other things the creation of maps in which specific regions of the city would be noted for arousing particular affective or aesthetic responses (not to forget the ultimate goal of social revolution).
The tour could also be a useful technique for confronting critical and timely questions raised by Paul Virilio, Elizabeth Grosz and other thinkers addressing issues (e.g., movement, architecture, cities, technology, virtuality, space, time, duration, transformation, and memory) related to our work.
Touring can be seen as a proposal for a way of exploring cities, tourist sites, and off-sites or, for that matter, the site of tourism.
The tour is also more than all of the latter points; it is a context, a situation, a form, a techne, a tool, an architectural proposal, a quasi-memorial to duration, passage, the present, transformation.
Touring may not even be touring. At times it can be more akin to Barthesian cruising: not swaddled in the stereotypes of monuments, the cruiser is more aware of the world around her/him or at the very least more aware of the very process or act of moving.”
The Interventionist / Walking in Place
A user’s guide to détournement
“A User’s Guide to Détournement (1)
Every reasonably aware person of our time is aware of the obvious fact that art can no longer be justified as a superior activity, or even as a compensatory activity to which one might honorably devote oneself. The reason for this deterioration is clearly the emergence of productive forces that necessitate other production relations and a new practice of life. In the civil-war phase we are engaged in, and in close connection with the orientation we are discovering for certain superior activities to come, we believe that all known means of expression are going to converge in a general movement of propaganda that must encompass all the perpetually interacting aspects of social reality.”
“Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can be used to make new combinations. The discoveries of modern poetry regarding the analogical structure of images demonstrate that when two objects are brought together, no matter how far apart their original contexts may be, a relationship is always formed. Restricting oneself to a personal arrangement of words is mere convention. The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the juxtaposition of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. Anything can be used.”
“Détournement not only leads to the discovery of new aspects of talent; in addition, clashing head-on with all social and legal conventions, it cannot fail to be a powerful cultural weapon in the service of a real class struggle. The cheapness of its products is the heavy artillery that breaks through all the Chinese walls of understanding.(4) It is a real means of proletarian artistic education, the first step toward a literary communism.”
“Apart from the various direct uses of detourned phrases in posters, records and radio broadcasts, the two main applications of detourned prose are metagraphic writings and, to a lesser degree, the adroit perversion of the classical novel form.”
“If détournement were extended to urbanistic realizations, not many people would remain unaffected by an exact reconstruction in one city of an entire neighborhood of another. Life can never be too disorienting: détournement on this level would really spice it up.”
GUY DEBORD, GIL J WOLMAN / A user’s guide to détournement (1956)
Bogotá y Le Corbousier
“Más allá del desarrollo que había logrado ordenar el urbanista Karl Brunner, desde finales de los años treinta, Bogotá empezaba a parecer obsoleta en el panorama de los jóvenes arquitectos de la Universidad Nacional, y debía evolucionar para adaptarse a las nuevas exigencias del capitalismo: más zonas residenciales, más vías de acceso, una zona industrial, y puntos culturales y de educación.
El Movimiento Moderno en la arquitectura estaba en furor, y Le Corbusier era uno de sus padres. Sus seguidores creían que la forma debía estar ligada al concepto de función: la ciudad tendría que ser útil a sus ciudadanos. Por eso, la Bogotá que imaginó se soportó en un diseño complejo de sistemas que dependían uno del otro para hacer eficiente su funcionamiento.
Los otros dos colegas europeos expertos en la materia, Sert y Wiener, ya habían hecho planes urbanísticos para Tumaco, Cali y Medellín, y su experiencia en Nueva York los llevó a hacerse cargo de “definir los sistemas de utilización de las zonas en las que se dividió la ciudad, el régimen de alturas y normas para la edificación, las densidades de población, los perfiles, estacionamientos, iluminaciones y arborizaciones de las vías y la planeación de los servicios públicos”, como lo asegura Tarchópulos en su tesis, la primera producción intelectual notable hasta ahora, pues no existía, ni local ni internacionalmente, un proyecto que indagara sobre el propio plan, su proceso y su trascendencia.
París, Nueva York, Bogotá
Desde 1949 hasta 1953, los tres expertos planearon una ciudad guiada por las bases del urbanismo moderno, pero que nunca pudieron ver construida con sus propios ojos. Desde el comienzo, los arquitectos formaron un triángulo de trabajo disciplinado y fluido: París era el taller del franco-suizo; Nueva York, el centro de trabajo de los directores de la TPA; y Bogotá, el núcleo de la Oficina del Plan Regulador, la cual fue presidida por el primer decano de la Facultad de Arquitectura javeriana, Carlos Arbeláez Camacho, quien se encargaría de los asuntos locales.
En 49 planos, Le Corbusier dibujó una ciudad conectada regionalmente, que estuviera guiada por su famosa teoría de las 7 Vs (siete vías): una forma para estructurar la malla vial de la ciudad que va de la calle más general a la más particular y sencilla. “Proyectó la conservación de los cerros como espacio paisajístico unido a los parques lineales de los ríos y quebradas, una zona industrial, la calle 26 que llegaría hasta el aeropuerto, las zonas residenciales del norte y el occidente, y un centro cívico que reuniría los ministerios y las ramas del poder público más significativas”, explica la docente.
El Plan Piloto incluía entonces un modelo regional, otro metropolitano y otro de ciudad; también un plan vial jerarquizado, la zonificación y los sectores y tipos de vivienda. Todo esto estaba acompañado de un informe escrito, el cual fue encontrado por Tarchópulos en el archivo de Josep Lluís Sert en la Universidad de Harvard, porque en Colombia no parece haber registro de dichos papeles, de acuerdo con el estudio de la investigadora. “Es como si se hubiera negado este trabajo, que no era perfecto, pero sin duda era lo más avanzado para la época”, afirma con la convicción que le dio el haber encontrado valiosos documentos de respaldo en la Colección Sert de la Universidad de Harvard, la Fundación Le Corbusier, el archivo de Carlos Arbeláez Camacho en la Universidad Javeriana y el Concejo de Bogotá.
Los materiales fruto de los hallazgos durante el proceso de investigación le permitieron además responder las preguntas que se hacía con curiosidad al inicio del trabajo: ¿cuál era el significado histórico del plan?, ¿cómo fue su proceso de elaboración?, ¿existían o no huellas de él en la Bogotá actual?, y, si existían, ¿a qué se debió que así fuera?”
Theory of the Dérive
Theory of the Dérive
by Guy-Ernest Debord
One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.
In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science — despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself — provides psychogeography with abundant data.
The ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of distinct neighborhoods with no relation to administrative boundaries, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction, must be utilized and completed by psychogeographical methods. The objective passional terrain of the dérive must be defined in accordance both with its own logic and with its relations with social morphology.
In his study Paris et l’agglomération parisienne (Bibliothèque de Sociologie Contemporaine, P.U.F., 1952) Chombart de Lauwe notes that “an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it.” In the same work, in order to illustrate “the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives . . . within a geographical area whose radius is extremely small,” he diagrams all the movements made in the space of one year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement. Her itinerary forms a small triangle with no significant deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of Political Sciences, her residence and that of her piano teacher.
Such data — examples of a modern poetry capable of provoking sharp emotional reactions (in this particular case, outrage at the fact that anyone’s life can be so pathetically limited) — or even Burgess’s theory of Chicago’s social activities as being distributed in distinct concentric zones, will undoubtedly prove useful in developing dérives.
If chance plays an important role in dérives this is because the methodology of psychogeographical observation is still in its infancy. But the action of chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting tends to reduce everything to habit or to an alternation between a limited number of variants. Progress means breaking through fields where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favorable to our purposes. We can say, then, that the randomness of a dérive is fundamentally different from that of the stroll, but also that the first psychogeographical attractions discovered by dérivers may tend to fixate them around new habitual axes, to which they will constantly be drawn back.
An insufficient awareness of the limitations of chance, and of its inevitably reactionary effects, condemned to a dismal failure the famous aimless wandering attempted in 1923 by four surrealists, beginning from a town chosen by lot: Wandering in open country is naturally depressing, and the interventions of chance are poorer there than anywhere else. But this mindlessness is pushed much further by a certain Pierre Vendryes (in Médium, May 1954), who thinks he can relate this anecdote to various probability experiments, on the ground that they all supposedly involve the same sort of antideterminist liberation. He gives as an example the random distribution of tadpoles in a circular aquarium, adding, significantly, “It is necessary, of course, that such a population be subject to no external guiding influence.” From that perspective, the tadpoles could be considered more spontaneously liberated than the surrealists, since they have the advantage of being “as stripped as possible of intelligence, sociability and sexuality,” and are thus “truly independent from one another.”
At the opposite pole from such imbecilities, the primarily urban character of the dérive, in its element in the great industrially transformed cities — those centers of possibilities and meanings — could be expressed in Marx’s phrase: “Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.”
One can dérive alone, but all indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross-checking these different groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions. It is preferable for the composition of these groups to change from one dérive to another. With more than four or five participants, the specifically dérive character rapidly diminishes, and in any case it is impossible for there to be more than ten or twelve people without the dérive fragmenting into several simultaneous dérives. The practice of such subdivision is in fact of great interest, but the difficulties it entails have so far prevented it from being organized on a sufficient scale.
The average duration of a dérive is one day, considered as the time between two periods of sleep. The starting and ending times have no necessary relation to the solar day, but it should be noted that the last hours of the night are generally unsuitable for dérives.
But this duration is merely a statistical average. For one thing, a dérive rarely occurs in its pure form: it is difficult for the participants to avoid setting aside an hour or two at the beginning or end of the day for taking care of banal tasks; and toward the end of the day fatigue tends to encourage such an abandonment. But more importantly, a dérive often takes place within a deliberately limited period of a few hours, or even fortuitously during fairly brief moments; or it may last for several days without interruption. In spite of the cessations imposed by the need for sleep, certain dérives of a sufficient intensity have been sustained for three or four days, or even longer. It is true that in the case of a series of dérives over a rather long period of time it is almost impossible to determine precisely when the state of mind peculiar to one dérive gives way to that of another. One sequence of dérives was pursued without notable interruption for around two months. Such an experience gives rise to new objective conditions of behavior that bring about the disappearance of a good number of the old ones.[1]
The influence of weather on dérives, although real, is a significant factor only in the case of prolonged rains, which make them virtually impossible. But storms or other types of precipitation are rather favorable for dérives.
The spatial field of a dérive may be precisely delimited or vague, depending on whether the goal is to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself. It should not be forgotten that these two aspects of dérives overlap in so many ways that it is impossible to isolate one of them in a pure state. But the use of taxis, for example, can provide a clear enough dividing line: If in the course of a dérive one takes a taxi, either to get to a specific destination or simply to move, say, twenty minutes to the west, one is concerned primarily with a personal trip outside one’s usual surroundings. If, on the other hand, one sticks to the direct exploration of a particular terrain, one is concentrating primarily on research for a psychogeographical urbanism.
In every case the spatial field depends first of all on the point of departure — the residence of the solo dériver or the meeting place selected by a group. The maximum area of this spatial field does not extend beyond the entirety of a large city and its suburbs. At its minimum it can be limited to a small self-contained ambiance: a single neighborhood or even a single block of houses if it’s interesting enough (the extreme case being a static-dérive of an entire day within the Saint-Lazare train station).
The exploration of a fixed spatial field entails establishing bases and calculating directions of penetration. It is here that the study of maps comes in — ordinary ones as well as ecological and psychogeographical ones — along with their correction and improvement. It should go without saying that we are not at all interested in any mere exoticism that may arise from the fact that one is exploring a neighborhood for the first time. Besides its unimportance, this aspect of the problem is completely subjective and soon fades away.
In the “possible rendezvous,” on the other hand, the element of exploration is minimal in comparison with that of behavioral disorientation. The subject is invited to come alone to a certain place at a specified time. He is freed from the bothersome obligations of the ordinary rendezvous since there is no one to wait for. But since this “possible rendezvous” has brought him without warning to a place he may or may not know, he observes the surroundings. It may be that the same spot has been specified for a “possible rendezvous” for someone else whose identity he has no way of knowing. Since he may never even have seen the other person before, he will be encouraged to start up conversations with various passersby. He may meet no one, or he may even by chance meet the person who has arranged the “possible rendezvous.” In any case, particularly if the time and place have been well chosen, his use of time will take an unexpected turn. He may even telephone someone else who doesn’t know where the first “possible rendezvous” has taken him, in order to ask for another one to be specified. One can see the virtually unlimited resources of this pastime.
Our loose lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious that have always been enjoyed among our entourage — slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc. — are expressions of a more general sensibility which is no different from that of the dérive. Written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game.
The lessons drawn from dérives enable us to draw up the first surveys of the psychogeographical articulations of a modern city. Beyond the discovery of unities of ambiance, of their main components and their spatial localization, one comes to perceive their principal axes of passage, their exits and their defenses. One arrives at the central hypothesis of the existence of psychogeographical pivotal points. One measures the distances that actually separate two regions of a city, distances that may have little relation with the physical distance between them. With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental dérives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the first navigational charts. The only difference is that it is no longer a matter of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism.
Today the different unities of atmosphere and of dwellings are not precisely marked off, but are surrounded by more or less extended and indistinct bordering regions. The most general change that dérive experience leads to proposing is the constant diminution of these border regions, up to the point of their complete suppression.
Within architecture itself, the taste for dériving tends to promote all sorts of new forms of labyrinths made possible by modern techniques of construction. Thus in March 1955 the press reported the construction in New York of a building in which one can see the first signs of an opportunity to dérive inside an apartment:
“The apartments of the helicoidal building will be shaped like slices of cake. One will be able to enlarge or reduce them by shifting movable partitions. The half-floor gradations avoid limiting the number of rooms, since the tenant can request the use of the adjacent section on either upper or lower levels. With this setup three four-room apartments can be transformed into one twelve-room apartment in less than six hours.”
Theory of the Dérive (Full Text)
The Society of the Spectacle
The Society of the Spectacle
by Guy-Ernest Debord
“Separation Perfected”
But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.
Feuerbach, Preface to the The Essence of Christianity
1
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
2
The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.
The Society of the Spectacle (Full Text)
Situationist Manifesto
“…THE EXISTING FRAMEWORK cannot subdue the new human force that is increasing day by day alongside the irresistible development of technology and the dissatisfaction of its possible uses in our senseless social life.
Alienation and oppression in this society cannot be distributed amongst a range of variants, but only rejected en bloc with this very society. All real progress has clearly been suspended until the revolutionary solution of the present multiform crisis…”
“…The church has already burnt the so-called witches to repress the primitive ludic tendencies conserved in popular festivities. Under the existing dominant society, which produces the miserable pseudo-games of non-participation, a true artistic activity is necessarily classed as criminality. It is semi-clandestine. It appears in the form of scandal.
So what really is the situation? It’s the realization of a better game, which more exactly is provoked by the human presence. The revolutionary gamesters of all countries can be united in the S.I. to commence the emergence from the prehistory of daily life.
Henceforth, we propose an autonomous organization of the producers of the new culture, independent of the political and union organizations which currently exist, as we dispute their capacity to organize anything other than the management of that which already exists…”
“…What would be the principle characteristics of the new culture and how would it compare with ancient art?
Against the spectacle, the realized situationist culture introduces total participation.
Against preserved art, it is the organization of the directly lived moment.
Against particularized art, it will be a global practice with a bearing, each moment, on all the usable elements. Naturally this would tend to collective production which would be without doubt anonymous (at least to the extent where the works are no longer stocked as commodities, this culture will not be dominated by the need to leave traces.) The minimum proposals of these experiences will be a revolution in behavior and a dynamic unitary urbanism capable of extension to the entire planet, and of being further extensible to all habitable planets.
Against unilateral art, situationist culture will be an art of dialogue, an art of interaction. Today artists – with all culture visible – have been completely separated from society, just as they are separated from each other by competition. But faced with this impasse of capitalism, art has remained essentially unilateral in response. This enclosed era of primitivism must be superseded by complete communication.
At a higher stage, everyone will become an artist, i.e., inseparably a producer-consumer of total culture creation, which will help the rapid dissolution of the linear criteria of novelty. Everyone will be a situationist so to speak, with a multidimensional inflation of tendencies, experiences, or radically different “schools” – not successively, but simultaneously….”
“… We will inaugurate what will historically be the last of the crafts. The role of amateur-professional situationist – of anti-specialist – is again a specialization up to the point of economic and mental abundance, when everyone becomes an “artist,” in the sense that the artists have not attained the construction of their own life. However, the last craft of history is so close to the society without a permanent division of labor, that when it appeared amongst the S.I., its status as a craft was generally denied…”
Situationist Manifesto (Full Text)
Geografía viva de la calle
LA CALLE: ESPACIO GEOGRÁFICO Y VIVENCIA URBANA EN SANTA FE DE BOGOTÁ
Vladimir Melo Moreno
1. EL PORTAL DE LA INTERPRETACIÓN
2. LA CALLE, HISTORIA DE LA CIUDAD: LA CIUDAD DESDE LA CALLE
3. BACATA, SANTA FE DE BOGOTÁ, BOGOTÁ,SANTA FE DE BOGOTÁ
Wanderlust: A History of Walking
“Where does it start? Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. Heel touches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot. The big toe pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight of the body shifts again. The legs reverse position. It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world, this walking that wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.
The history of walking is an unwritten, secret history whose fragments can be found in a thousand unemphatic passages in books, as well as in songs, streets, and almost everyone’s adventures. The bodily history of walking is that of bipedal evolution and human anatomy. Most of the time walking is merely practical, the unconsidered locomotive means between two sites. To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train. Which is to say that the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic. Here this history begins to become part of the history of the imagination and the culture, of what kind of pleasure, freedom, and meaning are pursued at different times by different kinds of walks and walkers. That imagination has both shaped and been shaped by the spaces it passes through on two feet. Walking has created paths, roads, trade routes; generated local and cross-continental senses of place; shaped cities, parks; generated maps, guidebooks, gear, and, further afield, a vast library of walking stories and poems, of pilgrimages, mountaineering expeditions, meanders, and summer picnics. The landscapes, urban and rural, gestate the stories, and the stories bring us back to the sites of this history.”
By Rebecca Solnit
Penguin Books ISBN: 0140286012 (Read the full introductory note here)
“El ritmo del andar genera un tipo de ritmo del pensar y el pasaje por un paisaje refleja o estimula el pasaje a través de una serie de pensamientos. Esto produce una singular consonancia entre un pasaje interno y uno externo, que sugiere que la mente es un paisaje dentro de otros y que el andar es un modo de atravesarlo. Un nuevo pensamiento aparece como una característica del paisaje, como si el pensar fuera más un viajar que un hacer.”
Walks of Life 
