#16 POWERS OF EXCURSIONS
Excursions, walking and talking, and the architect-walker
Why the talk is inspiring?
Seventeen years ago, after its first public project (a series of site-specific performances funded to the hilt by Arts Council England), Wrights & Sites ‘left the building’ as an escape, quite literally adopting walking as a methodology to quietly get on with its work. After a decade of creating post-Situationist ‘drifts’, structured tours, published ‘Mis-Guide’ books, public art and installations, the collective turned its attention back to the fabric of the city. With its roots in Wrights & Sites’ concept of the ‘architect-walker’ (e.g. Sideways Festival, Belgium, 2012; ‘On Walking’, Sunderland, 2013) and the reconnaissance excursions at the heart of Hodge’s recent solo project (‘Where to build the walls that protect us’, Exeter, 2013-14), this talk will draw on concrete examples of ‘walking and talking’ as artistic method and/or outcome to illustrate some of the powers of excursions.
The talk is held on 29 October, Thursday, 8.00 p.m. at the National Art Gallery (NDG), Konstitucijos av. 22, Vilnius.
Entrance is free of charge.
2015
Speaker
Stephen Hodge
How the speaker is exceptional?
Stephen Hodge is an artist-academic-curator from the UK. He is Associate Professor in Live Art + Spatial Practices at the University of Exeter, where he is an active member of the Centre for Contemporary Performance Practices. He generates Practice-as-Research across a range of contexts, for example: a year-long multi-disciplinary mobile charrette in his home city of Exeter, practice emerging from fieldwork reconnoitring the relationship between walking and composition in the work of Erik Satie, explorations of site and event in Second Life®, digital interventions on public transport, artist’s publications, galleries and festivals. He is a founding member of Wrights & Sites (www.mis-guide.com), four artist-researchers who, for eighteen years, have focused their attention on people’s relationships to places, cities and walking. They employ disrupted walking tactics as tools for playful debate, collaboration, intervention and spatial meaning-making.
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Why the book is worth reading?
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