Simon Persighetti: Practice as Research Presentation,
Dartington College of Arts, February 2007

The politics of place, issues of spectacle and anti-spectacle, and walking as an arts practice, form the core concerns of my research.

*…to walk with a sense of not knowing anything about the city…to walk as a constant experiment to discover the intricacies and individuality of your walk that is as distinctive as your handwriting.…to give a word to each footstep so that a walk becomes a story or poem…

*….to step on the cracks and find the gaps and make new tracks extending your territory becoming more aware of the restrictions being imposed by signs and surfaces and the aggressive armoured invasion of the car….

*…to amble, ramble and de-ramble the city in search of wildlife, ancient tracks, sacred signs and paths of desire and to fill abandoned roadside cars with earth and turn them into immobile gardens… 1

These are extracts from a Manifesto Towards a New Walking Culture first presented at Walk21 conference, Zurich , September 2005.

The title of my PhD research is:

Mis-Guided Exploration of Cities: an ambulant investigation of participative politics of place.

The research is being conducted with particular reference to the ongoing Mis-Guide projects, conceived and produced by the company, Wrights & Sites, of which I am a member. A group of walking artists based in Exeter (UK), who make work that engages with site and landscape across a range of media such as installations, walks, maps and alternative guide books. Since 1997, we've grown used to working in specific sites and landscapes with specific communities, but the publication of our new book, A Mis-Guide to Anywhere (April 2006), provided us with an opportunity to interact with a wider public.

Our apparent rejection of performance-making for an audience has led to walking with spectators as collaborators in the work, and has made the physical journeys and verbal exchanges along the way an integral part of the practice. Through this work I am harnessing existing knowledge about cities as spectacle in the footsteps of the Flaneur, the Dadaist, the Situationist and of contemporary works by, for example, Janet Cardiff, Graeme Miller, Mike Pearson et al. All of these artists use journey and place as the text, reference points and resources that generate or support their research and practice.

To wander through a diverse terrain is to feel the surroundings pass through one's body as the body passes through the surroundings . . . 2 (Robin Moore/ Childhoods Domain)

I am exploring a sense that urban spaces and places can offer passages to utopian, creative and optimistic relationships with the everyday.

If you've ever stood, in the early hours of the morning, and watched a city fill with snow, you will know that the first walker changes everything. 3 (Wrights & Sites, 2006)

I am engaged in a research writing or re-writing of the city activated by wanderings and explorations that can lead, for example, to an active engagement in issues of ecology and environmental planning.

In origin the flaneur was a detached and self-contained poetic figure, distanced from the crowd by his superior aesthetic sensibilities. He aimlessly wandered the city streets to gain inspiration, at once part of, and isolated from the urban crowd, whom he studied . . . 4 (Pearson)

Mike Pearson suggests that in the modern shopping centre, we have all become flaneur , “grazing, gazing, consuming….” However, our pursuits are more often governed by commerce in such controlled environments. In the main, we are not drifting aimlessly, we are not fuelled by some god-like overview, and our aesthetic sensibilities are more likely to be engaged in the pursuit of fashion and fast food. The aimless drifters of the contemporary shopping mall are perhaps those with little or no spending power, who rather than merging with the crowd, are swiftly picked out by the CCTV camera and the security guard. It is significant however, that the reflections of the city drifter from Baudelaire to Debord constitute a vast range of residual discourses as if the footsteps of the strollers have been replaced by, and recorded in text. It has, perhaps become what Walter Benjamin called the “Writing of the City” as if the perceptions of the flaneur, once transmitted, begin to engrave themselves upon the physical city and the bodies of its citizens. The notion of porosity in which the body makes the city and the city is a body, invites Benjamin's dream image of,

a book that is a city street cut through the body of the author by his lover. 5 (Benjamin)

In my contribution to a Manifesto Towards a New Walking Culture I considered the walk of the pedestrian as a means to excavate the layers of factual and fictional stories, meanings, associations and experiences of the city. In this case the walk can be considered as a tool of revelation where the act of walking draws lines, shapes and trajectories through the built environment as if the walkers are writing and re-writing the city with their bodies. The Danish architect Jan Gehl focuses upon the spaces between buildings being as important for consideration as the buildings themselves in the way that people attribute meaning to the places where they dwell.

The major function of…communal spaces is to provide the arena for life between buildings, the daily unplanned activities- pedestrian traffic, short stays, play, and simple social activities from which additional communal life can develop… 6 (Ghel)

This animated view of the built environment places its inhabitants to the fore and is helpful in changing our perceptions of the city as a free-flowing environment rather than a static set of constructs seen as functional buildings or lines and icons on a map.

…the urban space is a frequented place, an intersection of moving bodies. It is the pedestrians who transform the street into a space. Yet this walking is often orientated. We are drawn back to significant places, familiar places, memorable places, weaving them together in improvised narratives. We both read and write. Through memory and imagination, we can claim a measure of control. 7 (Pearson)

It is this claimed “measure of control “or at least its potential that can be described a s an exercise in writing. With a background in theatre-making, members of Wrights & Sites have all been engaged in writing for performance but it is the term wrighting or wroughting as in the manipulation of materials, that comes closer to the manifesto's definition of writing. It is a provisional means of exploring and generating polyphonic vocabularies of the city. 8 (polyphonic)

Within the debate about Practice as Research it becomes clear that research is sustained and approved according to INTENTION and MOTIVATION. This is expressed via a trajectory governed by a question that acts as a kind of prism or lens for the researcher. But this begs the question:

How can the artist make work without actually employing a conscious research imperative? Indeed, to what extent is it possible to make work without the recognition of previous ideas, images, works created by others in the past and present? In my own work what does it mean to add, scholarly references, analysis and justifications after the event? For example it was through the initial proposition to walk rather than inhabit a given site that led to the company's discovery of the Situationists and the beginnings of the Mis-Guide drifts. Where we part from the flaneur and the situationist is in a desire to include rather than exclude a wider participation in this work and its outcomes. And it is this kind of practice that leads me away from the book stacks and into the multisensorial library of streets, alleyways and other spaces in between. 9 I make this statement not as a rejection of the solely written dissertation but as a way of expressing the potential dynamic of multi-modal, active and collaborative research. To accept the invitations of the Mis-Guide project is to become a member of the search party.

Daria Loi has written a fascinating and exhaustive paper entitled:

A suitcase as a PhD? Exploring the potential of travelling containers to articulate the multiple facets of a research thesis.

He writes:

Due to the participatory methods and tools proposed in the research, I decided to explore the opportunities offered by a thesis to become a place for participatory practices to emerge and to be an artefact where readers could be asked to physically, emotionally, and conceptually experience ideas rather than just read about them.

I perceive as inconsistent the notion of discussing methods via a medium that does not allow such methods to be demonstrated and experienced.

I believe that in some instances a traditional PhD thesis format – the bound paper report – does not enable the expression of what one intends to share with others through the thesis and does not mirror the concepts one intends to promote. 10 (Loi)

To a certain extent I have addressed this dilemma by devising work in collaboration with a company and in inviting others to participate in the work. The dissemination of the work is absolutely intrinsic to the projects and much of it has occurred on foot. This is clearly illustrated by the manifesto statement:

To hold meetings, discussions, readings, and vigils on traffic islands or to make decisions on foot and on the streets instead of in airless committee meeting rooms. To write minutes, musings and decisions on paving stones. 11 (Wrights & Sites 2006)

The printed matter of the Mis-Guide publications and web access also allows that the work can be continued remotely. A Mis-Guide often takes the form of a guide book or a map. It suggests a series of walks and points of observation and contemplation within a particular town, city or landscape. Unlike an ordinary guide book, it is guided by the practice of mytho-geography, which places the fictional, fanciful, fragile and personal on equal terms with 'factual', municipal history. Author and walker thus become partners in ascribing significance to place.  

A Mis-Guide to Anywhere furthers this exploration by drawing attention to the differences and connections between places. It was created with an acute awareness of our own position in the world and the relative freedoms, as well as the particular perspectives that are particular to the UK . Can one, we ask, use a Mis-Guide 'anywhere'? We have challenged ourselves to contemplate creating 'walks' for places such as 'A City Under Siege' or for 'A Place Where There is a Road Block' as well as the possibility of playing with scales of exploration, from 'A Walk for Outer Space' to 'A Mis-Guide to DNA'. We deliberately draw attention to the flows and exchanges between places, looking for 'wormholes' to other places: minarets on a 19th century British hotel, flight paths overhead, a personal reminiscence sparked by a passing resemblance… We also suggest walks that will invite the walker to discover the moments where walking, or looking, becomes difficult. In these various ways, we explore the tensions and bonds between a given particular place and the unrealisable, infinitely various notion of 'anywhere'. (Wrights & Sites, 2006)

(April 2006) Using the SCALES 12 walk from the new publication, a group of 15 participants began outside the ICA by measuring the outlines of their bodies with lengths of string that were then cut to the correct anatomical lengths and extended down The Mall to Admiralty Arch. The instruction to 'walk the dimensions of your body' was thus extended by sharing and walking the total dimensions of the whole group's body outlines.

The issue of scale extended our perceptions of the immediate environment, particularly in such a monumental and officially proscribed zone. St James' Park, for example, is a pleasure ground governed by a vast menu of prohibition. Even the taking of photographs of flowers is regarded with suspicion, as the whole park and its associative elements are officially regarded as the property of the crown.

The group later used the string to redraw their body outlines on the gravel arena of Horse Guard's Parade, a simple activity that quickly drew the attention of curious tourists and CCTV cameras.

Another of our 2006 projects called Exeter Everyday was described as,

Completely unique, with over one hundred thousand participants, hundreds of millions of pounds of scenery and landscape, extraordinary logistical resources and deep improvisational skills. Exeter Everyday was billed as the biggest celebration in the city's history, perhaps to become a model for similar festivals throughout the world.

The hyperbole went on to say:

Most festivals emphasise the unusual and the extraordinary. Very rarely is there an opportunity to acknowledge the everyday. Exeter Everyday is filling that gap with a week of day-long festivals celebrating different aspects of everyday life in Exeter . Anyone in the city can take part. It is not necessary to do anything special. Simply to take notice of the everyday, guided by or ignoring the theme of the day.

Every day the people here make and re-make their city, by the ways in which they use the city, travel across it, mark it, mend it, walk over it, write on it, work on and in and under it. This is a chance for us all to enjoy the unexceptional power we each wield every day. 12 (Wrights & Sites 2006)

The Suitcase PhD researcher Daria Loi argues that,

…in some circumstances ideas should be expressed and accessed in multiple ways, offering the view that researchers should adopt an approach (he calls) multisensorial writing, an approach that mirrors how people experience and filter the world. 13
(Simon Persighetti Feb 2007)

References:

1, 11, Extracts from a Manifesto Towards a New Walking Culture first presented at Walk21 conference, Zurich, September 2005 and published in Performance Research, Indexes Volume 11.2, June 2006 ISBN: , Routledge, an imprint of Taylor & Francis Books Ltd - 2006

2 Moore , Robin, C. Childhood's Domain, Croome Helm Ltd, New Hampshire , USA

3 http://mis-guide.blogspot.com/

4, 7, Pearson, M. and Shanks, M. Theatre/ Archaeology, Routledge, London , 2001. pp.149

5 Burgin, Victor, In/ Different Spaces, University of California Press, 1996, London. pp.141

6 Gehl, J, Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space, Danish Architectural Press, Copenhagen, 2001. pp.59

8 Careri, Francesco, Walkscapes, Walking as an aesthetic practice, Land&ScapeSeries, Barcelona , 2002, pp. 73 (Flanerie is a late 19th Century phenomena describing the actions of the flaneur, “that ephemeral character, who in his rebellion against modernity, killed time by enjoying manifestations of the unusual and the absurd, when wandering about the city.”)

9, 10, 13 Loi, D. (2004) A suitcase as a PhD? Exploring the potential of travelling containers to articulate the multiple facets of a research thesis. Working Papers in Art and Design 3 Retrieved , Dec 2006 from URL http://www.herts.ac.uk/artdes/research/papers/wpades/vol3/dlfull.html
ISSN 1466-4917

12 http://www.mis-guide.com/everyday/exeter/overview.html

Further Information about Wrights & Sites site-specific arts practice and the Mis-Guide projects can be found on www.mis-guide.com


Simon Persighetti, Dartington College of Arts , Feb 2007