Mapping seems to become more and more a core theme in what I do in this residency. Yet in many ways, the activities that I initiate and what I do myself does not seem to produce or involve a map as such. I go, for instance, with Clive MacLennan for a walk, and we don’t follow necessarily a plan or check out coordinates. What we do could maybe described at best as drifting.
When Guy Debord put forward his theory of the dérive he thought primarily that this would be a new way of engaging with urban space as part of psychogeography. The dérive as an activity is intended to allow the participants to engage with what is actually there not only on a factual but on a visual and emotive level. According to Debord the best arrangement is a small number of people, groups of two or three, thus insuring that they are attuned to their environment in a similar manner. Having said that, the first dérives in Paris in the 1950s were not walks as we imagine them but were usually a day long drifting from bar to bar. In short, a pub crawl. When I go with Clive for a drift we do not go for a drink. We start at the x-church café but that is all. I might ask Clive about a place or landmark mentioned by someone at x-church and maybe we go there. But that is all. This kind of aimless wandering allows us to look at what is actually there in that moment in time. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, not two hours ago. The intention is not to record all the corner stones and bus shelters in the neighbourhood. Neither do Clive or I want to take note of every fly tipping site. I believe we simply engage with what comes visually together in front of the camera. This is not only the semi- permanent structures such as walls and trees but also the traces of usage and the present light, most certainly decisive in creating emphasis in what we perceive.
When I invite the smaller children of the kids’ project to put something on a very large piece of paper mounted on a board that is somewhat precariously balanced on a table in the café space I have learned not to expect actual roads or lines of houses. I must say, I can’t help it, and to my discredit I still prompt them with questions such as: ‘Do you like the corner shop?’ or ‘Do you go sometimes to the park?’ I am glad to say that they kindly ignore me and draw what they feel is important. This can be themselves, their family, their home, a swing. They use all the colours they can find and like to explore forms that expand the usual conceptions of the human body and our environment.
There are many authors on the expanse of these paper plains and what they draw more often than not overlaps. I actually do call them maps as they intended to capture and lay out what is there. They look to me like webs, emotive networks that link them to each other whilst capturing their dreams. Staggeringly beautiful, heartbreakingly frail.
Yet is not this just that what I aim explore? The way the residents within the communities of x-church feel about living in this neck of the woods? The emotional renderings of a neighbourhood? How it affects you to live just there? Does the ever changing environment that we as residents use as part of our daily routines not only influence how we feel but also visualise, in part at least, our rather all too complicated feelings?
Engaging with our emotions is never easy and can be rather messy. That it manifests itself in beautiful drawings and leaves visual traces in our environment is reassuring. I for once am not the biggest fan of psychogeography but the concept of the dérive is simply useful in this respect. I suppose I could call what I do as part of this residency just that, a dérive, as I aim to capture and map what is there by a conscious drift through everyday life. How affect might inform what is there and what we perceive, where we see the emphasis to be is simply intriguing and compelling. To me drifting within the communities of x-church might be my attempt of mapping what matters to me and maybe to many other residents of this world.
This blog post was first published on https://loosespace.wordpress.com/2018/02/27/the-lure-of-the-drift/
