Desire Lines is a collaborative research and performance project that investigates how we vote with our feet and how landscape and architecture are nurtured by our imagination, helping us to define ourselves in an ever-changing world. For the project, various artists from different disciplines will come together to foster new ways of seeing and being in the world, seeking to open a dialogue between inner and outer landscapes, and facilitating innovative ways to engage with place, self, the other and the whole.
Our path of exploration is what, in mapmaking and urban planning, is commonly referred to as “desire lines”. These organic paths have not been designed by a human brain, but are created naturally by animals and by our own unconscious following of paths already taken.
To involve both professionals and local residents, we are going to organise a number of workshops:
- One or two “walkshops“ with walking artist Alisa Oleva
- Regular Viewpoints sessions with Viewpoints teachers Claire Thill and Frieda Gerson
- A performance writing workshop with Claire Thill, looking at writing in a site-specific context with a special focus on personal stories.
These workshops will give us the opportunity to meet people from different walks of life, share each other’s stories and experiment with different approaches to our environment. The research period will be largely influenced by the practice of participatory art involving others in the artist’s creative process, allowing local people to become co-authors, editors, and real-time observers of the work.
The second part of the project will focus mainly on the development of the audio-walk.
We will define the various itineraries for the audio-walk. The artists will come together and engage in writing and development sessions, using the interviews and the research material as a main source of inspiration while also looking at how to integrate elements of fiction and the imagination. The sound designer will use the field recordings and interviews to compose a soundscape and interlace it with his original compositions.
The final section of “Desire Lines” will be preparing the site-specific performance, using the Viewpoints theatre improvisation and composition method. For this performance we will also use the documentary material collected during the research period as a starting-point for the improvisations. The performance will be immersive:
The performance is meant to be a preparation for the audio-walk. At the end, the audio walk will be launched. This is going to happen simultaneously on the website, where people can download the soundtracks and then take the audio-walk at their own pace. The audio-walk will be available from June onwards and also after 2022.
Project leader: Ampersand Variations
Artists: Claire Thill, Alisa Oleva, Frieda Gerson, Emre Sevindik
