![]() As David Harvey notes, ‘the freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is… one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights’. It is however, more than a question of demanding access to spaces and experiences of urban life that might be restricted – and becoming increasingly so – it is a reclaiming of the possibilities for remaking the city, and ourselves through our (temporary) occupations of urban space. The politics of urban exploration needs to be seen in the context of centuries of protest concerning rights to the city: political actions concerning who can go where, and how the control and ownership over space in the city is made transparent. Later, I recounted the day to Harriet Hawkins, who shares an interest with me on waste and exploration, and we wrote through some of these ideas, which we thought the Brunel students might appreciate. Students eagerly hopped the fence and started rummaging around in the human debris while Will and I pontificated on the politics of midden and off-limits urban space. We decided to undertake a field trip to a local trash dump, sans permission. Last week, Will invited me to guest lecture one of his psychogeography classes at Brunel. Also, if we accept their apparently apolitical stance, how then is urban exploration not just part of the spectacle it supposedly seeks to subvert? James Kingston should feel free to defend himself at this point. Secondly though, where many have questioned the political potency of urban exploration, Will suggested that every act is (of course) political and that the important question in regard to urban exploration, rather, was how effective its political force might be where it is un/under-articulated as a political praxis. It follows that if urban explorers don’t want their practice to be ‘political’, we might question why are we working so hard to unpack the political implication of the practice. He argued for exploration of the ‘everyday’ in convincing terms, eroding the worn binary between the ‘everyday’ and the ‘spectacular’. First, Will took issue with the idea that the revolutionary need be exceptional. However, in process of doing so, he opened out some really interesting points of contention around the practice of urban exploration, revolving around two central notions. ![]() As you might expect, Will ran circles around me in the discussion. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.” -Guy DebordĪ few months back, I was invited to the Barbican to discuss my book Explore Everything with Will Self (seen above playing out Wanderer Above the Sea of Rubbish). “Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |