As an Abstract Tours agent operating from a portakabin placed in Schloßplatz, I offered tours based on geometric figures which participants were invited to draw on a map of Berlin with the help of Perspex stencils.
The superimposition of geometric figures (Euclidean abstraction) on a map (cartographic abstraction) mocked the conceptual abstractions that inform the configuration of spatial practices, such as architecture and city planning, the design of routes, the schematic grid of property lines and ultimately, the construction/ destruction of the Berlin Wall and the corporate reshaping of the German capital.
As in the Situationist practice of detournement, it entailed the capture of a code, not its imitation. It was inverse, not symmetrical. The process exposed, rather than concealed, an imposition created elsewhere in the political and economic field. A geometric route suppressed the dimensions of reality and also submitted to it. By following these abstract lines on the ground, and hence going through a process of de-familiarization and disorientation, participants could enrich the experience of their environment by overriding their habitual functional, relational, or historical perception of the city. The geometric routes established unfamiliar links, connecting places that have been fragmented, separated by the abstract production of space. Points, lines and areas established a different syntax of sites, based on chance. In order to follow your geometric route you had to trespass, jump over fences or ask strangers if you could pass through their apartments.
These unguided tours also fragmented totalizing representations of the city, opened up a plurality of perspectives which in turn produced provisional, transient, and partial perceptions and representations. Once these representations were assembled , the spaces of the city were incorporated into something closer to a fictional narrative than an objective record. By re-describing the city, they invented it.
The dérives encouraged by Abstract Tours functioned as an immaterial architecture of landscape. Walking became a primary act in the symbolic transformation of the territory, an instrument of knowledge. If we think of knowledge as process-based, rooted in 'corporeality’ and bodily practices, knowledge and practice become mutually interactive.
Starting as a linguistic metaphor, Abstract Tours revealed the obscenity of abstract space ‘on the ground’ - what occurs behind the façade - restoring a materialistic and critical dimension to the otherwise fetishistic experience of tourism
No comments:
Post a Comment