project title
Climb this little hill, go down it again
project description
For the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon, the city was both muse and mystery as source of inspiration for his writing, elusive and enchanting, a space for the imagination to roam. The city appears to him as error with fingers of radium, my melodious mistress, my appealing shadow.
How can we understand such early psychogeographical perceptions of the city as fundamentally a space of error? What resonance does his early twentieth-century vision, born inter-war, have with our contemporary experience of the city?
This talk will examine how the notion of failure is implicit to both writers and artists exploring the drift, in representation and creative practice, from the early nineteenth to mid twentieth century. If error served as a point of departure from the physicality of walking urban space, where has it led us?
We will consider the ways in which earlier Dada and Surrealist experiments in walking have influenced or shaped current modes of rambling. Does error guide us in todays psychogeographical trips or have we truly lost our way?
name
Colette Meacher
location
London
profile
Colette Meacher has worked as artist in residence, photography teacher/curator, and as a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of the Andes in Bogota, Colombia. Most recently, she worked as Director of Talks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (ICA).
Colette's work explores urban poetics, psychogeography and historical conceptions of landscape. Last year she was involved in producing an alternative guidebook to London's streets with the artists Anna Best and Neil Chapman entitled 'Occasional Sights: A Guidebook of Missed Opportunities and Things That Aren't Always There' for The Photographer's Gallery in London.
She also published an article on the defacement of public sculpture in the volume 'Surface Tension: Problematics of Site' edited by Ken Ehrlich and Brandon LaBelle.
Colette is currently writing a history of walking practices.
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