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

The politics of place and walking as an arts practice form the core concerns of my research. The research is being conducted with particular reference to the ongoing Mis-Guide projects, conceived and produced by the site-specific arts company, Wrights & Sites, of which I am a member. 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, which revolves around place, site-specific arts and urban walking, I am harnessing existing knowledge about cities as spectacle in the footsteps of the Flaneur, the Dadaist, and the Situationist and in recognition of contemporary works by artists who use journey and place as the text, reference points and resources that generate or support their research and practice. I am exploring a sense that urban spaces and places can offer passages to utopian, creative and optimistic relationships with the everyday. 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 the spirit of a walk between places and ideas I have attempted to structure the writing as if the writer and the reader are passing though or over different thresholds. We pass through thresholds or doorways or across boundaries in our physical and mental development but we also employ such concepts practically and imaginatively in the devising of performance work. As theatre-makers we could make claim to be leaving the everyday and entering a dedicated space called a studio where by degrees we often engage in vocal, physical and mental practices that might appear very strange and out of place in any other context. The crossing of thresholds and boundaries is also part of the composition of performance with entrances and exits, appearance and disappearance, transformations and shape shifting as key aspects of such work. Some of these thresholds in this thesis might be regarded as doorways or obstacles whilst others might verge closer to the ambient hubs noted by poets and pychogeographers. I see this writing as a means of interrogating and exploring and developing my own practice towards particular social and environmental issues

Performance and the Stratigraphy of Place: Everything You Need to Build a Town is Here

Referencing the public art project project Everything You Need to Build a Town is Here, Wrights & Sites invite the reader to treat the chapter as a site rather than as a treatise. We have structured the text in four layers. Some materials drop through from one layer to another. Elements are introduced at one level and imitated or digested at another. The layers are variously unfinished and indiscrete, subject to influences and interferences, partly reconciled and partly not. While each of the layers has been written towards something, they were all attenuated at approximately the same time. There are coincidences. The writing attempts to address the editor's brief to: consider how archaeological methodologies and techniques might be used to reflect more directly on the contemporary world itself; how we might undertake archaeologies of, as well as in the present

Stadtverführungen in Wien (Mis-Guide in Vienna)

This output investigated the concept of 'Mis-Guidance', a recurrent focus in the practice-as-research work of Wrights & Sites since the collaborative group’s inception in 1997; Persighetti is co-founder/core member. In conjunction with Tanzquartier Wien and Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Festival), Wrights & Sites selected, led workshops for and mentored Viennese artists, culminating in a series of public events/performances in June 2007 (see published programme detailing all events). Core areas for exploration here included: relationships between text/body/image and site/architecture/cityscape; journey and narrative; personal and public material. Wrights & Sites led tours through the city, responding to personal, found/gathered, fragmentary and questionable material, whilst encouraging strategies of playful subversion in relation to the Heritage or Municipal frameworks employed in conventional guided tours. Having framed the final pieces of work under a collective title, 'Vienna Mis-Guided', Wrights & Sites invited artist-participants to create a 'mis-guided' work for a chosen site or journey through the Viennese cityscape, drawing from their own practices: e.g. choreographed scores, discrete artist-led walks, meetings in unusual places, work with new/locative media, provocations taking the form of maps, apparently mislaid personal letters, lists or timetables. An expert jury from the disciplines of sociology and urban planning (Anette Baldauf), cultural philosophy and anthropology (Herbert Lachmayer), composition/music (Bernhard Lang),and architecture (Bärbel Müller) selected 16 projects from 140 Mis-Guide proposals submitted by Viennese artists. Wrights & Sites mentored the development of projects during a three-week working process; performance events took place throughout the city. This festival of events was previewed with a presentation by Wrights & Sites, and a lecture by philosopher and chair of the Da Ponte Institute, Herbert Lachmayer, on ‘Walking and Talking into Existence’

Signs & Wonders, Research and Public Art Project

Using the notion of the pedlar as a carrier of multiple viewpoints, Katie Etheridge, Simon Persighetti & Phil Smith peddled ideas through trade, exchange and conversations. Through located performances and walks along city streets, in the marketplace and down country tracks they distributed specially commissioned tokens and wondrous pamphlets. Through extensive research the works responded to the story and surroundings of the infamous Lancashire Witch Trials (1612) by examining the meanings we invest in objects and reacting to the evocative local landscape. Commissioned by Green Close and LICA, funded by Arts Council England., Following this public project, we reworked the performances and outcomes for a gallery setting in a process that accorded with Live at LICA interest in artists working across disciplines and contexts. Originally manifesting as performance walks and site-specific live art installations, the reconfigured work created new experiences, questions and exchanges in TRANSORMED: Double Bill, Exhibition October 2013., This project extends my research by increased involvement in generating outputs that lead to muti-media and legacy based records of the practice. Different modes of dissemination and participation have been explored through muti-modal approaches to investigation of landscape and history in a particular context

Mis-guided for Belluard Bollwerk International

Wrights & Sites curated projects by international artists; mentored the stages of development: created the Mis-Information Office, elements of the artists’ work were exhibited and maps for 'mis-guided' events were provided. Here, we hosted artists' dialogues and offered opportunities to walk, talk and construct situations with Wrights & Sites. Also the location for the launch of the festival, the M-I Office including an exhibition presentation by Wrights & Sites about our work and the significance of the chosen projects. My practical and theoretical contributions to Wrights & Sites is research on a continuum with the development of the company practice. We work with agreed and shared structures on each project whilst identifying the individual angle, lens and content that each member wishes to pursue. This allows for individual voices to thrive within collaborative outcomes., My research into the contextual impact of this project surfaced via theoretical framing of the of the project; curatorial work with regard to selection of artists and discursive and mentoring practice in the delivery of experiential investigations of the city with the selected artists and public participants., Our perception of space is shaped by habitual and conventional relationships to it, by the tangible and intangible laws of place. Our movement through city space is deeply affected by dominant spatial frameworks. These are constructed by municipal authorities, the tourism or heritage industries, architects and planners, estate agents, surveillance camera manufacturers, and so on, with the aid of devices such as guidebooks, maps/plans, information sheets, guided tours, CCTC and security, signposts and pathways., As the backbone of the Belluard Bollwerk International 2008, we presented a programme of new „mis-guided” work aimed to disrupt and reveal the unexpected, the “elsewheres” in the city of Fribourg as ‘Mis-Guide’ events taking inspiration from Wrights & Sites initial concept

A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture: Dealing with the City

A version of this collaboratively authored article was first presented as a performance-paper at a plenary session of ‘Everyday Walking Culture’, Sixth International Conference on ‘Walking in the 21st Century’ (organised by Walk21 at Lakeside Conference Centre, Zurich, 22.09.2005). The manifesto was commissioned from Wrights & Sites as a keynote intervention in the conference, with its focus on the future of cities, public access, the creative agencies of walkers and their implications for civic planners/policy makers. What are the political, cultural and structural means whereby walking may be re-valued in urban contexts? (See http://www.walk21.com/conferences/zurich/asp). In this context, a number of questions and issues were investigated through dialogue and practical research around Zurich. Subsequently the paper was reworked for Performance Research, with interventions by walking artists Richard Layzell, Bess Lovejoy, Fiona Templeton and contemporaries of the Dadaists. Other live versions have been presented at PSi (London, 2006), Exeter tEXt Festival, and Dartington (all 2006). Drawing on the exploratory work of the Mis-Guide projects, in particular on our use of the 'drift', this manifesto proposes strategies for the active/creative pedestrian engaged in practices of walking that re-fashion the city. We envision 'walkings' as neither functional necessity nor passive appreciation/consumption of the urban environment, but rather as constitutive re-inscription/animation of the everyday. Our concerns as site-specific practitioners informed our decision to present the paper in a manner specific to the conference’s Casino setting. We divided our text into the four suits of a playing-card deck, with each 'suit' of the manifesto written by one of the members of the company. The material’s order of presentation was determined by a croupier shuffling a card deck. This differentiation of voices/dispositions is retained in the published print version

A Mis-Guide to Anywhere

International responses to Wrights & Sites’ first book suggested that many non-residents of Exeter were able to employ versions of the book’s strategies in other places. Therefore the company explored the creation of a 'Mis-Guide' that deliberately sets out to provide transferable ideas, tools, inviting inventive dis-placement. Initially it was conceived as a 'generic' guide: an unusual approach for ‘site-specific’ artists, given the company’s recurrent focus on specific localities rather than 'types' of place. It became apparent that the same set of instructions/stimuli become radically different when transferred between places, and that these differences are informative and generative. After two years of research and walking experiments in Manchester, Channel Islands, Copenhagen, Zürich, Paris, New York, Shanghai, rural Zambia, etc, 'A Mis-Guide to Anywhere' was launched at the ICA (London, April 2006). In conjunction with 4 ‘Mis-Guided Tours’ that started and ended at the ICA, the launch was presented as part of the ICA’s Performance Programme. The book’s title and content explore the notion of ‘anywhere’ and its relations to ‘somewhere’. Created with an acute awareness of our own position in the world, our relative freedoms and particular perspectives, the book seeks to draw attention to connections and differences between disparate places. A contextualising agency is proposed: the work is completed by the walker and only becomes specific to its location in the walking

An Exeter Mis-Guide

An Exeter Mis-Guide, a pocket-size guide-book designed collaboratively with visual artist Tony Weaver, suggests a series of walks and points of observation/contemplation within the city of Exeter. Unlike conventional guide-books, it is informed by ‘mytho-geography’: a Wrights & Sites concept and practice which seeks to value the fictional, fanciful, fragile and personal as much as the 'factual' within municipal histories. In this sense, it seeks to disrupt institutionalised city tour guides and conventional practices of tourism. The book proposes other models of engagement with urban space through invitations to explore (routes, roles, realities). Here, author and walker become partners in ascribing significance to place. Many of the walks were developed in conjunction with Exeter citizens, generating a variety of perspectives on the ways we negotiate ‘our’ city. The goal was to help local people discover unknown or overlooked aspects of their city, and to celebrate and proliferate individual senses of place. Here Wrights & Sites proposes a critical remove from performance-as-spectacle, a disposition that emerges from our investigation of the 'drift' ('dérive') as means of uncovering fresh approaches to interaction with the city. Rather than inviting audiences to a specific site to see performances, we invite people to investigate with us by walking with us, finding places along the way, following desire paths and short cuts. Our ideal is for the city as a whole to be animated as creative space and adventure playground inscribed with ephemeral monuments, footprints, spaces of refuge. We endeavour to hand over agency for infinite possible trajectories and perceptions to anyone who wishes to participate in their own creative explorations

Everything you need to build a town is here

‘Everything you need to build a town is here was not conceived in an artist’s studio,’ suggest the artists, ‘but only really emerged after several months of reconnaissance walking – not only in the obvious places, like the seafront and the town centre – but also in the industrial, post-industrial, residential and edgelands of Weston.’ Through this extensive site research, Wrights & Sites have developed a constellation of 41 signs that each engage with their immediate vicinity and are dispersed across Weston-super-Mare. Each of the signs refers to aspects of architecture in Weston-super-Mare – whether grand, municipal, amateur, accidental, forgotten, part-demolished or imagined – and contains a carefully worded instruction, observation or comment, designed to encourage the reader to think again about its specific location, to conduct an action or thought experiment. The signs have been organised into eight interconnecting layers – The Panoptic, Foundations, The Great Architect, The Amateur Builder, The Botanical, Light, Time, Ands – each of which is indicated by a symbol incorporated into the signs. The locations are widely scattered from public gardens, to the museum, car parks, restaurants and allotments. The design of the signs has been influenced by an existing sign found in Uphill village, at the southern edge of Weston-super-Mare, and almost all will appear in a location without interpretation or explanation. The artists describe how the Old Town Quarry operates as a keystone site for the series, at the entrance to which visitors are able to locate a map and description of the project in its entirety

A Manifesto for a New Walking Game: 'dealing with the city'

‘Everything you need to build a town is here' emerged after several months of reconnaissance. Through this extensive site research, Wrights & Sites developed a constellation of 41 signs that each engage with their immediate vicinity and are dispersed across Weston-super-Mare., Each of the signs refers to aspects of architecture in Weston-super-Mare and contains a carefully worded instruction, observation or comment, designed to encourage the reader to think again about its specific location, to conduct an action or thought experiment., Each member of the company identified locations and references points to devise signage specific to their own areas of interest. My own research into the town was framed by the discovery of a Botanical survey that revealed locations and patronage in addition to providing a kind of ecological snapshot of plant life of the town. The interweaving of the botanical with architectural models was also used as a template for considering present built environments in consideration to future town developments. This approach chimed with a continuing strand of personal research into place as a sensorium also including consideration of the sonic, acoustic and musical cadence of architectural structures of towns and cities. These areas are further represented in a paper (Hodge et al 2013) in The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World (Graves-Brown et al)., Wonders of Weston was part of the Sea Change programme (2008 - 2010), managed by Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (1999 - 2011) on behalf of DCMS. Situations and Field Art Projects were a series of commissions aimed at sustainable, social and economic regeneration., Situations is a research programme based at the University of the West of England, experienced in commissioning projects outside conventional gallery or museum contexts, and developing curatorial research, public events, seminars and publications. www.situations.org.u