Open air

Use

As time travellers, we like to go out into the open air to practice signal hunting, reading the environment and interpreting it according to a set of instructions, either to stimulate world exploration, or to practice a form of futurology. To practice a form of wild futurology. Maybe to hatch visions, to dig for clues, to test hypotheses. Sometimes, it is a matter of questioning, criticising the public space, or of attacking the plasticity of reality: changing the lens, the reading grid, the layer, replacing a habit of looking. **

As Pascal Lebrun Cordier writes in the magazine Urbis: “In the public space, forms of standardisation are numerous as we know. Artistic intervention, on the other hand, shapes new spaces which, by definition, will not exist elsewhere. This is precious.”

Protocol

Take any exercise and test it outside. Intense looking, creating worlds by walking, guided walk to focus on one thing, signal hunts. Take any exercise and try it out outdoors.

Testimonies

With children of about 12 years old. We tried sensory inspection, then the construction of characters from mental projection and then we went on a survey of the neighbourhood. As we walked, a fiction was written orally in our group. Whole sections of reality disappeared and other uses of the city surfaced. In this neighbourhood of small working-class houses, all the same, only the doors had been personalised by the inhabitants. The city retained its present appearance in the fiction, but behind the doors a new life was invented.

Anna Cz.

Credits

Perhaps we can thank the psycho-geographers. “Of so many histories in which we participate, with or without interest, the fragmentary search for a new way of life remains the only exciting part.” — Introduction to a critique of urban geography, Les Lèvres nues, n°6 May 1955, Brussels.

Written by Anna Cz.