Ghostly Footsteps: Voices, Memories and Walks in the City

Abstract

This paper is concerned with urban walking and the work of contemporary artists and writers who take to the streets in order to explore, excavate and map hidden spaces and paths in the city. The focus is on an audio-walk by the Canadian artist Janet Cardiff entitled The missing voice (case study B), which is set in east London. Connections are also drawn with other recent projects in the same area by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair. The paper discusses how these artists raise important issues about the cultural geographies of the city relating to subjectivity, representation and memory. Cardiff’s audio-walk in particular works with connections between the self and the city, between the conscious and unconscious, and between multiple selves and urban footsteps. In so doing, she directs attention to the significance of dreams and ghostly matters for thinking about the real and imagined spaces of the city.

Art, politics, memory: Tactical Tourism and the route of anarchism in Barcelona

“…19 We recognize that Tactical Tourism offers some very modest interventions into the politics of urban space in Barcelona, and that furthermore their work is politically ambiguous; whilst critical to the de-memorialization of cultural tourism in Barcelona, their work also contributes to a local municipal discourse of a 'subversive city' that helps to position Barcelona in certain ways, not least as a particular kind of tourist destination. 20 However, their work, which is in line with a broader and more widespread 'urban explorations' movement, 21 does pose some interesting questions concerning the relation between art, tourism and crucially, politics. First, rather than focussing on sites which are somehow out of the ordinary or spectacular (the model of looking around established within 'the tourist gaze') this form of tourism focuses on making ordinary spaces appear extraordinary, granting them an excess of meaning and significance.…”

Making sense of sound: Visceral sonic mapping as a research tool

“…Walks in the outside world guided by recorded sound and voice and usually incorporating a personal stereo have become a means to reengage with the everyday world (Butler and Miller, 2005;Pinder, 2001). For example, Mohr proposes that such an engagement with sound-specific approaches can assist in rethinking our everyday relationships, that, by subverting our culturally entrenched reliance on seeing as a way of distancing and differentiating the self from others, we were perhaps more open to entering a relationship with the environment not as detached observers, but as engaged participants (2007: 108).…”

Walking in the City: The Geographies of Everyday Pedestrian Practices

“…Rendell participated in part of their research on the river Fleet in London and explains how they used the practice of walking in ‘refining this knowledge’ (181) of the river. Pinder (2001) is also concerned with urban walking and how many contemporary artists and writers ‘take to the streets in order to explore, excavate and map hidden spaces and paths in the city’ (1). He argues that the sound walk created by artist Janet Cardiff throughout the streets of London, entitled ‘The missing voice (case study B)’, ‘emphasises the sensuousness of walking as a mode of apprehending the city that is tactile, aural and olfactory as well as visual’ (5).…”

“…However, despite this ‘renewed’ interest and ‘spate of reinvented flâneurs and flâneuse’ (Pinder 2001, p. 8) there are some who remain particularly critical of using the concept of the flâneur and pedestrian movement as a means of ‘reading’ the city. For example, although Macauley (2000) discusses the ‘value of focusing on walking as a method of understanding the city’ (211), he also warns that ‘it is important to keep the larger context in view and not to “fall down” and become a purveyor of a reverse‐privileging’ (211).…”