Wri(gh)ting Walking

Wrights & Sites is the name chosen by a performance collective of five artist-academics (Simon Persighetti, Cathy Turner, Stephen Hodge, Phil Smith, Tony Weaver) based in Exeter, southwest UK. Clearly, the "special relationship to place" that the group claims is signaled here, but the name also suggests an endearingly old-fashioned kind of craft, a making of objects. In fact, since it was founded in 1997 the group's work has tended to focus less on the kind of making suggested here than on live encounters: performances, walks, and performative lectures. However, in 2003 a collaboration with the designer Tony Weaver led to the production of a quite beautiful object, an alternative city guide book entitled An Exeter Mis-Guide. This promised to "give you the ways to see the Exeters no one else has found yet," incorporating among its 90 pages a "journey in smell," an "angry walk," a "walk for exhibitionists or reality-TV-show wannabes," and a set of "touch tours."

The slimline, spiral-bound format is used again for the group's follow-up project, A Mis-Guide to Anywhere (2006). Here, as in the earlier volume, each single- or double-page spread contains a series of instructions for a walk that readers might take, but in this case in any site of their choosing. We are, for instance, invited to "find somewhere to be private in a public space," to "go with a friend to any marker in the city that may constitute a memorial, and read aloud to each other these silent words or names," and, "in a place that is new to you, dream that you live there." Some of these walks respond to the generic impulse of the new project by remaining sparse and open-ended: the instructions for "static drift," for example, read

Find somewhere to sit. Stay there for 1–24 hours. Watch what goes on.

Others require a particular context or set of circumstances; these include the "cross-country walk for a hen party," and the "walk for a place where there is a road block." And then there are those that are not, it seems, intended to be physically undertaken but instead to stimulate thoughts about contemporary relationships to place. In this latter category, "a walk for metaphorical space" reminds us of the wealth of spatial terminology through which we've become used to conveying non-spatial ideas: "negotiate your way out of it . . . enjoy pastures new . . . don't become stuck in a rut . . . reach an impasse . . . push back the boundaries."

In its focus on walking as a performative act, the Mis-Guide connects with a growing trend in contemporary performance. Other examples include Fiona Templeton's play of the late 1980s, YOU—The City, in which an audience of one at a time was led around a city (New York in the first version of the performance) by a series of actors working with a flexible script. More recently, artists such as Janet Cardiff in Canada and Lone Twin, Pearson/Shanks, and Graeme Miller in the UK have found in the walk a productive format for exploratory, shifting, and interactive encounters with audiences. What is different in the present example is that the encounter between artist and audience is confined to the page.

A Mis-Guide to Anywhere is clearly not intended as a scholarly text, and I will not attempt to review it as such. It is often whimsical, its fragmentary form works cumulatively rather than sequentially, it does not articulate an explicit argument, and there is no attempt to reconcile the occasional inconsistencies of style and approach that emerge from the four contributing voices. The book does, however, make a nod towards a more formal academic apparatus in its bibliography, which usefully lists a wide range of texts across disciplines (including geography, archaeology, anthropology, and literature) that address contemporary versions of travel. Included here is Guy Debord's much cited "Theory of the Dérive," and indeed—while links between the Mis-Guide instructions and such interventions into everyday life as Happenings or Fluxus actions might be made—it is more specifically the Situationist legacy...