Our understandings of space emerge from action, indeed space is to be defined as a ‘certain possession of the world by my body’ (Maurice Merleau-Ponty) ¹

In this essay I intend to revisit an urban intervention, Abstract Tours, I realised in Berlin in 1997, discuss its critical potential and highlight the relationship between this project and the Situationist practices of dérive and détournement.

Abstract Tours

IIn 1997, during a one-year stay in Berlin, as a recipient of a grant from the International Studio Programme, I operated a ‘tour agency’ from a portakabin placed in Schloßplatz, formerly known as Marx-Engelsplatz, one of Berlin most central squares . ²

Inside, I gave out 1:10,000 scale maps of various areas of the city onto which visitors and residents could draw abstract, linear routes using the outlines of different plexiglass shapes. There was a choice of ten forms, from a triangle corresponding to about three hours on foot, to a square of about two days. The length of time varied according to how much the route was adhered to; sometimes to climb over a fence needed less time than to go on a long deviation around the block. The plexiglass stencils were placed at random on the map by the person or group performing the tour - a regulated use of chance that ensured that none of the patterns would generate the same route. All participants were encouraged to follow their itinerary as closely as possible and to the best of their physical abilities: in order to ‘stick to the line’ some jumped over fences, cut through private properties, climbed over walls and crossed rail tracks, while others chose to swerve from their route in order to dodge obstacles. Two elderly men and a disabled woman used their car and a weelchair instead of walking.

Though each tour passed through different parts of the city, in two cases people found themselves crossing the same cemetery and climbing the same wall. There was no ‘pre-set time’, one could do one part of the route one day and another part the next, or repeat it more than once.

Those who took part in the project were invited to document their experience (the choice of how and with what was left up to them) and play an active role in the organization of ‘Telling the Stories’, the exhibition that was hosted by the Künstlerhaus Bethanien ³ a month later. Around 45 people, among whom Stalker ⁴, accepted my invitation and contributed videos, photographs, sketches, found objects, log books, audio recordings, and journals. Others simply turned up to share their experience in the forum discussion that took place alongside the exhibition. During this event I discovered that one group performing the tour with a crowbar, ropes and other climbers’ gear, had been intercepted by the police, and questioned for hours; two people had wandered on to a private golf course (that did not feature on any map!) stealing the balls that were later exhibited as trophies; members of Stalker had marked their route by leaving a white trail of flour behind them (an action that also prompted someone to call the police); a Czech tourist had persuaded an old German lady to let him into her house on the grounds that it was on his route; and a Berlin resident spent hours inside the headquarters of Schering, a pharmaceutical company, successfully dodging their security guards.

A shift away from exclusive representational control by the artist, an introduction of a polyphony of voices, a redistribution of representational authority, ‘Telling the Stories’ intended to address the issue of representation, raising both moral and epistemological questions about who is authorized to ‘re-present the city’.

Rather than imposing monological coherence and closure, ‘Telling the Stories’ allowed parallel and conflicting representations to coexist. It was a dialogical approach to the spatialization of the ‘urban’, that involved subjects who differed in age, origin, gender, cultural and professional background, sensibility and attitude.

The different kinds of experiences that people found significant and decided to record during their abstract tours, provided a questioning of conventional representations of Berlin.

Cracking the code (on the ground)

Abstract Tours parodied the idea of a Stadtrundgang (German for ‘sightseeing tour’, literally meaning a ‘round city-tour’) by literalizing it and suggesting possible geometrical variants, such as triangular, square, or trapezoidal tours.

The gesture of drawing a geometrical pattern on the map also parodied the modernist’s conceit that ‘the transcendental forces of geometry must prevail’. It mimicked 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 last but not least, the construction of the infamous Berlin Wall.

By walking along the lines traced on paper, rather than realizing them on the ground with a wrecking ball and reinforced concrete, abstract tourism aimed to expose the code, rather than imitate it, an inverse, rather than a symmetrical practice. One could trace the same geometric shapes that constitute the kernel of the architectural redesign by the act of walking them.

The choice of abstraction had been made in order to expose, rather than conceal, an imposition generated elsewhere in the political and economic field, a framing process that imposes its vision, where groups that have "inherited" the city have a claim on its symbolic spaces. At the time I was working on the project ‘Abstract Tours’, Berlin's identity was being redefined by the re-establishment of its capital status and the restoration of its pre-wall plan in a central and crucial area of the city. This urban fabric was being transformed by the juxtaposed interests of multinational companies as investors, and by the space requirements for the new parliament and federal government buildings.

Land Art? Not quite

If at first glance the project seems to show analogies with the practice of conceptual artists like On Kawara, or Land Art experiences, on closer examination the differences become evident.

On Kawara, for instance, traced on a map the outline of his random walks in New York, the map came afterwards and became the document of a performance without audience.

In the case of Land Art, it was always the artist who selected the places to work in, and made aesthetic choices regarding the medium and mode of representation.

Abstract Tours was based on a different premise, it denaturalised taken-for-granted social and spatial practices and emphasised collective creativity, rejecting the separation between art and everyday life.

I insisted that my role was one of operator rather than artist (I was not the protagonist of an exemplary experience, I neither performed nor guided the tours), I provided maps that did not differ from those sold by the official tourist office, and actively encouraged a spatial practice wherein bodily negotiation was critical, contestational and inventive.

Abstract Tours aimed to foster social creativity rather than self-expression, and produce a shift in the locus of creativity from autonomous, self-contained individual to a new kind of dialogical structure. Defining this project as ‘artistic’ would have produced a series of conjectures and expectations in those involved, stabilized meaning, and emphasised the aesthetic dimension, thus narrowing the scope of this intervention.

When asked by the media ⁵“what Abstract Tours was all about”, I usually gave different answers: one day I would say that it was an instance of anti-tourism, the next an urban exploration, but carefully avoided to use the term ‘art’. Too often one tends to assign creative, spatial behaviour to performance artists and other specialists in provocation; the notion of ‘transgression’ is conceptualized as a synonym for avant-garde intervention.

Yet, in my view, the most interesting forms of spatial praxis are those that seriously and effectively call into question the status of the creative specialist, rejecting moribund clichés of artistic individualism, genius, and eccentricity.

A heuristic device

Abstract geometric tours cut through the city, intersected with discrete terrains, established unfamiliar links, and reversed the dominant trend towards fragmentation, separation and disintegration of urban space. Based on chance, the points, lines and areas established a different syntax of sites. This opened up the state of enclosure which has been pre-conditioned by a tourist industry that proliferates historical revisions, idealizes urban space, and creates selective landscapes for consumption.

By following her/his line one encountered the residual, interstitial, ‘banal’ spaces that are ignored by tourist narratives, penetrable and impenetrable buildings, residential areas, warehouses and sweatshops, industrial estates, construction sites where workers speak foreign languages, cemeteries, playgrounds...

Geometric tourism exposed the construction of the tourist gaze as inextricably bound up in the notion of contrast and difference. Tourism is widely conceived as an opposite to work, and the practice of travel takes the tourist away from the familiarity of places of employment or residence and into places that have been selected as providing varying levels of contrast to the familiar.

Tourism, as any form of production, has reshaped the city. Through compression and condensation traditional strategies of coherence have been eroded, our experience of a city has been flattened out to an easily digestible narrative.

Abstract tourism did not single out isolated historical buildings of ‘touristic value’, but stressed instead the relation between buildings, it did not highlight "Die Mauer" (the remains of the Berlin Wall left standing for tourists), but played an operative role in revealing the countless walls, fences, obstacles hindering public access on both sides of the city. A geometric route both ‘suppresses’ and submits to, the dimensions of reality. It generated a set of conditions disclosing the confinement rather than making illusions of freedom. It fostered an embodied knowledge that was both imageric and sensate. The sensate is, after all, the surface and limit of everyday life, the skin, texture and ethos of everyday life.

Our understandings of space emerge from action, indeed space is to be defined as a ‘certain possession of the world by my body’ ⁶

Abstract Tourism aimed to promote an active and embodied experience of the city, as opposed to a purely visual consumption of it. The more carefully one examines space, considering it not only with the eyes, but also with all the senses, with the total body, the more clearly one becomes aware of the constraints imposed by abstract space, described by Henri Lefebvre as ultimately ‘visual, geometric and repressive’. The meanings conveyed by abstract space are more often prohibitions than solicitations or stimuli (except when it comes to consumption, and tourism as a particular form of consumption). Prohibition - the negative basis of the social order - is what dominates here. The symbol of this constitutive repression is an object offered up to the gaze yet barred from any possible use.

‘It is impossible to say how often one pauses uncomfortably for a moment on some threshold while passively, and usually unconsciously, accepting a prohibition of some kind. Most such prohibitions are invisible. Gates and railings, ditches and other material barriers are merely the most extreme instances of this kind of separation. Far more abstract signs and signifiers protect the spaces of elites from intruders.’ ⁷

Some participants of Abstract Tours stressed that the city had become ‘hard’ once they renounced their customary rationales for moving and acting, once they had to wrestle with visible and invisible obstacles in order to hold their course.

Following one’s line inevitably leads to some forms of transgression, as abstract space commands bodies, prescribing or proscribing gestures, routes and distances to be covered. The act of moving across such space goes under the name of ‘trespassing’.

Skip Thomson, one of the participants observed:
‘One of the things that first struck me about ‘geometric tourism’ is that it tended to deprivilege the regime of the visual in the encounter with the ‘different’ or ‘foreign’ place/space. I wonder if other people also felt a re-emphasis on the tactile, on touching and wrestling with, and became more aware of their bodies in relation to the force of constructed space on their tours...because so much emphasis on the visual consumption of place leads to a sort of ‘bodiless’ subject-position: all-seeing eyes, gazers, not bodies but eyes and technologically enhanced vision (cameras, video-recorders).’ ⁸

Abstract dérives ?

The Situationists recommended that urban space be navigated "à la dérive", that is to say ‘drifting’ through varied ambiances.

‘In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones’ ⁹.

The technique revolved around the idea that, through the instinctual exploration of the emotional contours of one’s environment, playful and antiauthoritarian places and journeys can be discovered or created. The practice of the dérive involved an unstructured wandering through the landscape, allowing oneself to be drawn consciously and unconsciously towards those sites and movements that heighten one’s experience of place and disrupt the banality of one’s everyday life.

Some critics have described Abstract Tourism as a type of dérive, pointing out the similarities between my project and this practice. I personally think that Abstract Tours is more closely related to another situationist practice, that of détournement, as theorized by Raoul Vaneigem, which involves taking elements from a given system to turn them against it, a parodic destabilization of the spectacle that exposes its alienating effects.

Though I can subscribe to the Situationist programme in so far as it rejects a specialised notion of cultural production and the institutionalization of the creative process, I have a few reservations about the viability of the dérives in our present situation. Just drifting is not enough anymore. It simply replicates the bored passivity of the ideal consumer.

In fact I think of Abstract Tours as a critique of the dérives, which is not to be intended as a dismissal, rather as a critical development of a practice that was, after all, theorized in 1956!

Abstract Tours took place some forty years later, in a city where ‘playful and antiauthoritarian places’ such as Tacheles feature in mainstream guidebooks ¹⁰, where the ‘carnivalesque’ is actively promoted by local authorities, and events such as the Love Parade are sponsored by multinationals and contribute to boost the image of Berlin worldwide.

In my opinion the dérives suggested by Guy Debord have lost much of their critical potential as they have become more the norm: when consumption replaces production in most urban areas, both tourists and consumers are actually invited to wander around together, in a ‘leisurely manner’, when the psychological effects of artfully created ambiances are well known to, and exploited by, those who design shopping malls (mercenary psychogeographers?).

The Situationists proposed that new maps expressing psychogeographical possibilities and explorations should be drawn up, and this is precisely what guidebooks do, by suggesting walks through neighborhoods and districts that present a ‘unity of atmosphere’ and organizing movements around ‘psychogeographic hubs’: the ‘Bizarre and Sinister Quarters’ envisaged by Ivan Chtcheglov (aka Gilles Ivain) in his ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’ have become a reality, as well as the ‘experimental city’ that ‘would live largely off tolerated and controlled tourism’.

Though the Situationists shoved aside bourgeois conventions of creativity, they tended to replace them with a closely related mythology of the bohemian political activist, as Alastair Bonnet ¹¹ rightly pointed out.

The so-called ‘most dangerous subversion there ever was’ (as Guy Debord bombastically described the practice of the dérive ), was often a blokish left-bank bar-crawl dignified with the label dérive, organized around a set of very recognizable stereotypes: the individual genius, the glory of isolation, the arrogance and pride of young men. ¹²

Conclusion

Though Abstract Tours could not ignore the legacy of Situationism, its main purpose was not to engage in a posthumous dialogue with it, rather to question the way people make use of the city, move within urban space, negotiate its constraints, experience and represent this space. Abstract Tours aimed to foster social creativity rather than self-expression, gave prominence to an embodied experience and knowledge of space which is, in my view, inherently political without being ideological.