Street Haunting: Reflections on staying at home and walking the city Johanna Steindorf (German/ Brazilian)(Languages spoken: German, Portuguese, English and Spanish)

Taking Virginia Woolf’s essay “Street Haunting” and the book “A Journey Around My Room” by Xavier de Maistre as a starting point, in this audio paper I talk about how sheltering in place during the global pandemic has transformed our experience of staying at home and of walking the city. These are two interconnected aspects of our experience in the world that also play a major role in my artistic practice. Many of my works deal with mediated presences, with the real-and-imagined presence of bodies in space. In the video series “present views of past streets” you are taken along imaginary walks in Google Street View. In audio walks such as “still here, sometimes there” a voice speaks over headphones and accompanies you on an actual walk outside. In this paper, I will present these and other works, look at them from the perspective of 2020 and propose a discussion on the impact that the mediated experience has on our lives and what possible futures we can imagine.

Full text: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UGk7cUdsFGydE0Dvc64OkucyjmRbqVNO/view?usp=sharing

High quality download (wav, 1 GB): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A5OUOfMuQbnuKDNo1CFXP0LjSkLWLIf/view?usp=sharing