Transnational Spaces

I have been exploring everyday urban spaces, particularly thoses of Paris and Limerick and how they have become so familar to me through presence, participation and interaction. Using psychogeographic elements, look at  these transnational spaces.

 

Map Paris 1860



Paris 

Some background history..

Paris is the capital of France, located on the River Seine, in the north of the country. Paris has  a population of 9.93 million.

 

Paris is no more than 2,000 years old. Gauls of the Parisii tribe settled there between 250 and 200 BC and founded a fishing village on an island in the river that is the present-day Ile de la Cité -- the center around which Paris developed. Paris was known as Lutetia (Lutece) in ancient times, The city  was conquered by Julius Caesar in 52 BC, and existed as a regional center under the Romans and in the early Middle Ages. In 987, Hugh Capet, Count of Paris, became king of France, and under his successors, the CAPETIANS, the city's position as the nation's capital became established. Often characterized as spirited and rebellious, the people of Paris first declared themselves an independent commune under the leadership of Etienne Marcel in 1355-58. The storming of the Bastille in 1789 was the first of a series of key actions by the Parisian people during the French Revolution. Paris also played a major role in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. In 1871, during the Franco-Prussian War , the city was besieged for four months until France surrendered. After German troops withdrew, French radicals briefly established the Commune of Paris. During World War I the Germans were prevented from reaching Paris, but they occupied the city during World War II from 1940 to 1944.



Nowadays over 30 million foreign tourists visit Paris every year. The city has lots of interesting places to visit, such as Notre Dame cathedral, the Louvre museum and lots of nice outdoor cafés where you can soak up the Parisian way of life.

 

Map Limerick 1820




Limerick

Limerick city is the fifth largest city in Ireland. It was founded by the Vikings in the early 9th century.When the Anglo-Normans finally captured Limerick in 1195,their first task was to fortify it. King John's castle was completed around 1200 and work began on enclosing the city with a wall. Itw as well protected by having two gates of Thommond Bridge and Baals Bridge. By the end of the fourteenth century Limerick city became known as Englishtown. 



When the Normans first arrived in Limerick many of the original natives moved across the Abbey river to an area called Irishtown. This became an important enclave and it was also walled. The work was slow and went on through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Citadel complex was completed, towards the end of the 1590's the main features of which are thankfully still preserved. The gate house and inner gate can be seen in the grounds of St. John's hospital.
When taking the extra-municipal suburbs into account, Limerick is the third largest conurbation in the Republic of Ireland, with an urban population of 90,757.  Limerick is the second-largest city in the province of Munster, an area which constitutes the midwest and southwest of Ireland. The city is situated on several curves and islands of the River Shannon, which spreads into an estuary shortly after Limerick.



                                                                  Both cities today





Today both cities are rich and vibrant.

                               

psycho-geography

The production of psychogeographic maps, or even the introduction of alterations such as more or less arbitrarily transposing maps of two different regions, can contribute to clarifying certain wanderings that express not subordination to randomness but complete insubordination to habitual influences (influences generally categorized as tourism that popular drug as repugnant as sports or buying on credit). A friend recently told me that he had just wandered through the Harz region of Germany while blindly following the directions of a map of London. This sort of game is obviously only a mediocre beginning in comparison to the complete construction of architecture and urbanism that will someday be within the power of everyone- Guy Debord.

                                  

          Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, 1955 

Situationist International 

Describing the techniques and practices of psychogeography requires going back in time to the post second world war years. It was described at Guy Debord, writer and philosopher and prominent member of Situationist movement in 1955 as  'The study of precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals'.

The Naked City- Guy Debord

Debord's famous psychogeographical map, The Naked City (1957), was composed of certain areas of a popular street map of Paris. He cut the map to individualize these areas and  registered these areas using arrows.  Debord was a  latter day radical modernist (drawing heavily on Dada and Surrealism) in the post-war era. He had the aim to restore a kind of genius loci to the late capitalist environment. 

The Situationists tried to restore an aesthetic of festivity, play, intrigues, subversions, and games to counter the numbing effects of the "spectacle." In his inspired postmodern manifesto The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord laments "everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation." The city has lost its identity along with the subject, and subjective reality – especially aesthetic sensitivity – is worn down to a faded copy of authentic experience. The "spectacle" is "a social relation between people that is mediated by images." Postmodern space must be "cut-up" to yield its buried presence, as it has been consumed entirely by consumerist space: "The spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere." The derive undermines the spectacle's regime, which is essentially optical. The drift technique shifts perceptual emphasis from the optical to the proprioceptive (body consciousness, the sense of one's physical presence). The spectacle, which has become "the focal point of all vision and all consciousness," is an optical regime that separates the subject's consciousness with his or her body: the spectacle is "the culmination of separation," and the "official language of universal separation" that is "the domain of delusion and false consciousness." Reality itself has become a spectacle, another commodity. 

Society of  a Spectacle- Guy Debord

Situationism was a radical leftist response to the perceived end of modernist (or "high") art and culture. When the spectacle takes hold, all material space yields to commercial space: it loses its "soul" or constitutive absence, no atmosphere. Tourism reduces the city to a carnival entertainment, a pre-packaged product to be consumed. It's not that psychogeographical space has disappeared, but rather it has been buried under layer upon layer of the "expressive surfaces" of commercial space (advertisements, prescribed entertainments: any rigid organization of space and communal participation). Psychogeography is the study of the traces, vectors, and affects projected in cultural space. If the spectacle renders social reality to absolute transparency, as Jean Baudrillard claimed in Simulations, then this transparency, or obviousness, or objectivity, is the essential illusion that holds the postmodern in a state of permanent historical suspension. The function of the Situationist drift is to explore the other side of the spectacle, the unmediated (and traumatic) real veiled by the spectacle's absolute objectivity, or mimetic resemblance to the real.

In his recent novel  Spook Country (2007), William Gibson draws on the contemporary psychogeographic practice of locative art to comment on the postmodern, global commercial space where psychogeographical space, or the unified ambiences studied by the Situationists, has been lost. Spook Country tells the story of a cadre of spies, artists, and losers who collide in the roiling turmoil of twenty-first century, destabilized geopolitics. In the novel, a freelance journalist named Hollis Henry is hired by a technology magazine to investigate the use of locative media in contemporary art. Henry encounters a several locative artists who create three-dimensional sculptures in an augmented reality that can only be seen with special VR goggles. These artists represent Gibson's vision of the 21st Century psychogeographer. It is no accident that Gibson's favorite author is allegedly Iain Sinclair, a writer and researcher based in London who has written several books about his psychogeographic excavations of the London underground. For Gibson, to reinvest the postmodern spectacle with its lost presence, or gestaltic identity, is to create a spectacle on top of the spectacle: to externalize the mysterious, unattainable real that inheres in psychogeographic ambiences.

Gibson's use of description reminds us that the entire space of the postmodern subject's reality  is in a sense a controlled surround – a kind of prison cell –that permanently envelops the body, like an aura. It is precisely what cannot be mapped yet it is under structural control.

The Situationists practiced psychogeography in part because it is an artistic practice that anyone can learn and master. It is the only artistic practice (besides Brechtian theatre) that combines aesthetic practices with the potential for real proletariat revolt. 


For Debord, the purpose of psychogeography, and of postmodern revolt in general, is to disrobe capitalist culture, which negates aesthetic sensitivity, censors art and poetry, and discourages intelligence and analysis. To break free from the norm of society.

As Debord said in "Theory of the Derive:" "The exploration of a fixed spatial field entails establishing bases and calculating directions of penetration. It is here that the study of maps comes in — ordinary ones as well as ecological and psychogeographical ones — along with their correction and improvement." 

--------------------------------

John Briscella's projects communicate new spacial concepts for cities by introducing simple ideas into everyday life and surroundings. From the smallest iterations, to large-scale urban compositions, the works respond to experiencing environments in their contextual relationship to the observer(s).

On the street

Donkey Fords chipper on John Street

I pass by this chipper most days. The  mouth watering smell of chips and vinegar catches me instantly, the sound of the ladies behind the counter shouting orders  catches my attention then having to maneuver the abandoned cars parked outside fords while folk run in to grab their chippy tea is another experience to be had.

As part of my psychogeographic and mapping experience I have always been drawn towards this place,  its pulls me and my senses in while passing by, smell, sound and the physicality of the place. I had been thinking that I would like to do some piece with/about this space. while I was considering sound as a way to explore my environments I thought it would be a great idea to create a transnational space .. Donkey Fords chipper and Shoppi in Paris. While walking by Fords one evening on my way home from a long day in college I decided to pay the chipper a visit. It was very much a spur of the moment thing and I queued up like a hungry customer deciding what to order. I made my way down the queue and the elderly  lady took my order of a bag of chips with extra salt and vinegar. After completing my order i asked to speak to her in relation to an art project i was developing. I explained that i was an artist and I would like to take their photos and create and installation in their workspace. The lady looked confused and told me to return the following day when the manager was there.
I returned the following day  to speak with Joe one of the many managers. I explained my project to him and tried to explain things in lay man terms as i think some folk can become stand-off-ish when it comes to art. I have heard on my occasions; 'its just some art thing, and really not knowing much about the art thing at all so i felt it was my duty to explain my proposed project and get this man on board. He was an amusing man and ready for a bit of craic and banter. He did make it clear that he had no appreciation for sound installations and would prefer a painting for his walls. 
I was disheartened by Joe's lack of interest in my work but on the contrary it was lovely to engage with him. On reflection I do think I could have handled the engagement more professionally and maybe tried to twist his arm a bit but this is not the manner in which  I work. I don't like to force people into a artistic collaborative process when they are not willing  or wanting to. It is important to keep positive and continue towards the task ahead  and consider what will work for all concerned.




                                                         ---------------------------------------

Montage of images; John street, Limerick.


Creating maontages of spaces provedes a new way to explore and discover

-----------------------------

Another place of interest is the Dental Technicians further down the street from Fords in Broad Street. As I have walked by here on a daily basis  also became familiar with a man that sits at his desk. I see him through the window and he is always working away contently. He makes teeth. I decided to pay him a visit also. strangers enter into interaction with high levels of uncertainity about each other, this is understandable. We began a dialogical process that  formed organically as both our socialisation processes were at a maxium. He was more forthcoming and very positive and even wanted to pose for the camera. He had an interesting story and loves sitting at his desk at the window and has done it for 13 years now. 
He says for him he sits at the window and draws the outside in and I guess that it what he has done to me. I took some photos of Anthony and of his working environment. 

I left his environment feeling very positive after approaching this man that I had observed for months,previously restrained from entering into his world. 

Mapping Paris

Words—I often imagine this—are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in “foreign commerce,” on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house, is to withdraw, step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for creatures that cannot be found in words.

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

                             

    

                      

I decided to take a trip to Paris to stroll the streets there, Debord did this on a regular basis and I wanted to sense this for myself. I decided to print out a google map of Limerick city while in Paris. In reality I could have brought my own map but I choose not to do this, by doing so I wanted to use a map that was accessible to everybody from anywhere in the world. It was a hard task as these two cities are very different. But no matter  where any two cities are situated geographically it will be difficult to traverse one using the others maps.

The Limerick map I used while strolling the streets of Paris

Debord and the situationists did this in Paris by walking down the streets using various different maps and finding themselves in various spaces. He reflected on this through various methods of recording and analysing.

Parisian routes I experienced while utilizing a Limerick Map

An Alleyway I found myself in - 'Robert's Street'

This was in interesting exercise as I was able to concern myself with a final destination outcome rather than be concerned with the presence of space and me passing through these spaces. I found myself looking ahead to see when i would have to talk the next street and if that would match with my physical space. In many cases it did not match up so I would have to improvise. I found myself taking some streets off the beaten track while was very explorative.

A route found while walking down 'Patrick Street '

Found in a doorway- ' I will give my love to one'

Comparing directions

Mapping while walking the streets

Mapping my location

Map of a walk through a park

Sound Mapping

Graffiti discovered on wall