nothing in the area but a highway

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Artists and academics were invited to participate with an audio paper (a performative or walking audio essay) or an audio walk for the walking arts encounters/conference Drifting Bodies – Fluid Spaces / Made of Walking (VII).

Walking Event
Drifting Bodies / Fluent Spaces – Lab2PT & Made of Walking (VII) – Guimaraes (Portugal)
https://wlc.zone/1cy

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· 22 - 24 Jul, 2020

This audio paper is an excerpt from a walking project dedicated to the economies, histories and aesthetics of the A10 ring encircling Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Taking the form of a conceptual audiovisual tour, it seeks to create semi-performative rituals of attention in the abstract, deterritorialised urban space surrounding the ring. This excerpt is a narrative investigation into Westerhoofd, North-East of the A10. Taking a review of the area left by a disgruntled tourist on Trip Advisor as its starting point, this audiopaper will be an inquiry into a place that appears to have “nothing in the area but a Highway”.(1)Rooted in the practice of embodied counter-cartography, this investigation critically probes into the liminal sites stitched together by the A10, places which pulsate with a buried and unattended history. It seeks to create the conditions for a unique attentiveness, one which aims to resituate and reembody the listener within these spaces and histories through a series of suggested gestures and actions. This research asks what it means to stop in places that are intelligible only when traversed speedily, behind glass windows. A circular route through which commodities, people, and information flow that remains largely invisible to the pedestrian. What would happen if we cut through the ouroboros and let its contents bleed out? The economies, aesthetics, and histories that border the ring seem entombed in a live burial, barely registered or seen as deserving of an attentive gaze. This accelerated perception, characterised by speed, smoothness, and absence of friction negates the possibility of perceiving what is fragmented and contradictory. Here, the physical act of walking, of attending via walking, can counteract the perceptual experience mandated by transit; allowing us to stumble upon the city’s hidden and repressed spatial formations.(1) DempsyS, “Amsterdam Viking Cruise Docks”, Trip Advisor, 2016, https://ibb.co/th0NM0X. Screenshot by author.

Full text: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Tir9LSSShYEAhbXBUDwkc4q9OqYZ87NE/view?usp=sharing