PROJECT 02 BENCHSPACE WALK WORKSHOP
Aims

 

 

Saturday 12 July 2008

Touching the City Walk Workshops provide the opportunity to discover lesser known public spaces and to explore their characteristics and potential. Hundreds of forgotten and ignored spaces could inspire, ignite or re-awaken public ownership of the city. Through the process of walking in a group, which invites discussion and contemplation, we question and re-think the existing qualities of such spaces and contemplate potential alternative futures.

We raise questions of locality and generality, of appropriate and inappropriate fantasy, of the triumph of utility over delight and, occasionally, of delight over utility. We encounter joyful spaces where our spirits take flight, compressive spaces where the weight of the human throng causes us to crave seclusion and melancholic spaces where we might become more contemplative or perhaps even overcome by nostalgia or depression. This Walk Workshop explores how interventions might help translocate generations of pale ‘simulation genre’ beings from sofa to bench. Processes of walking, presentations of experiments in the stimulation of personal experience, discussion and contemplation will help us to map alternative futures for public life.

Reserve a place on the walk...

For the artist or academic, 'walking in the city' holds certain resonances - the anti-walk of the Dada movement carried out on 14th April 1921, in Paris, at three in the afternoon in the pouring rain; the Parisian walks described by Walter Benjamin; the projects to go beyond art of the Surrealists and Situationists and the Dada projects to install walkers as readymades into the banal places of the city.

Our walk is not, however, intended to be overly weighed down by history, or by theory - though it might be enlivened by either or both. it is intended to draw out our personal experiences based upon and influenced by our personal pasts and insights whatever they might be. Once drawn out how might these personal messages or insights be shared with others in the city and what responses might we hope to elicit or contemplate in our dreams?

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