Dérives

The first of the dérives or psychogeographical walks took place yesterday, from Grand Parade.  The walk, titled 'It's Not Where I Am That Stays With Me', took a group of eleven people around the city, trying to locate twelve posters which described where you would be and what you would see from that position in Amsterdam.  The project is by Combination City and Oliver Flexmann, and although the artist wasn't there, the walk led by  Chris Clarke was very sucessful.  The whole group worked together, collaborating using a map without street names, attempting to follow a walk which mirrors the same twists and turns in Amsterdam.   Trying to imagine the cityscape of another place, as you walk through a familiar landscape creates interesting connections and questions.  How arbitrary is location?  How many times have we walked a series of paths which directly mirror routes in other places without realising it?  Could maps of all cities be superimposed one upon another with a certain amount of crossover.  Are other people in other  places following this route also?

This layering of space on space, place upon place evokes new visual imagery for me around the idea of location.  We often think of 'local' or 'place' as a sort of web, with strands connecting one person, one landmark, one place to another.  Many of these are of course, are also connected to each other, so gradually a web-like map evolves.  Putting another map onto this, creates a new set of strands crossing, complementing and contradicting the ones already there.  I can imagine this becoming 3-dimensional, building up into a sphere, a globe of interconnected threads and points, with much more densely threaded areas at the points where localities are strongest. 

The map for the  ArtTrail catalogue echos these ideas, in that it too has no street markings and can be layed over each of four separate 'plans' of points, specific locations and starting points.  It echoes too the relationships and connections that go to make up any given 'locality'.