“Walking a Metaphor” Brussels-Geneva-Berlin

1/3 Brussels. September 24-30, 2015

An urban walking project in collaboration with RECYCLART and monitored by Thierry Davila.

Cyril Bron and David Fuehrer will follow a route that they will never be able to take. They will walk as close as possible to the Brussels Ring Road. Areas without sidewalks, they will invent a route between slides and forests, barriers and embankments, bridges and tunnels. These different crossings will open up space to unexpected landscapes.

They will be equipped with a camera which will transmit a live stream of images and sounds broadcast to Recyclart in Brussels.

It is about questioning the highway which appears as a metaphor for our time.

Through the device for producing images and sounds, the viewer is confronted with a tele-presence, distant proximity, anonymous and artificial. Artists and spectators experience the strangeness of an experience which combines both urban residue and technology, those left behind and properties under high protection.

Cyril and David invite you to come and join them to draw an ephemeral path with them, share a meal or an evening.

walking

a Metaphor

by cyril bron &

david fuehrer

 

 

“Despite permanent satellite coverage and

mesh surveillance cameras, we do not

know nothing about the world” (Philippe Vasset)

We have just finished a film, “our reflections”

which in a certain way tends to reflect something

thing of a society from those it has

excluded. By drawing the margins, don't we see this appear

What do they contain? With “our reflections”, we worked

with people whose destinies are linked to drug addiction. If he

was above all about making visible the journey of these

people through self-portraits, we punctuated the film

by putting us too on stage, in a bathroom, a

camera in place of the mirror, a sort of witness to our

questions:

-basically, who are you?

-basically.

Thus ends the film, indicating that something, something

part, radically escapes us.

“our reflections” was filmed in the margins, with people at

away from society and on the outskirts of a certain cinema

documentary. This marginality imposed itself on us as

the experience of a strangeness: a sign that something is slipping away,

like the perception of an expression that escapes us in the face of

camera or listening to our recorded voice. The strangeness

signifies a form of inaccessibility which questions our

representations of normality, of ourselves and beyond, in

changes the experience.

This strangeness profoundly questions our identity because

“here” there are no longer all the layers of belonging

social, everything that allows us to put ourselves on stage in the

everyday life. We are then crossed by a counter-experience,

not an experience of which "I am the author", but

an experience that happens to us. So something of ourselves

escapes us: we experience a non-coincidence in

heart of oneself. “The foreigner does not exactly cover otherness

of others; it therefore also extends to the own body, to the forms of

art and nature” (Waldenfels, Topography of the Foreign p.

11).

After “our reflections”, we wanted to continue this experience,

let us meet, be affected again by this excess

of strangeness: astonishment, curiosity, fears, injury and

fatigue. We were looking to rub shoulders with something on which we

would not have a socket, access to which would imply the suspension of

our knowledge, our itineraries, our representations.

Origins

1

Sharing a beer in a bar in Brussels,

after a week strewn with uncertainties and

questions, a sudden idea

press: explore the city outside the circuits

marked, transgress the routes defined by the

urban functioning and rationality. If the

rationalization conditions travel, it

also conditions the way of thinking, and our modes of

consumption. We want to get out of what we

impose daily travel, breathe poetry into

our movement and affirm our subjectivity as a

reinvention and rediscovery of the urban environment. But

the expression of subjectivity is in response to a space, it

begins elsewhere and before us, it precedes us, and we

let's exceed it in the response. In this temporal rift, in this

uncertain gap, it is the urban areas which will

literally pass through us.

Our working tool will be the drift, that of the situationists:

“the hasty passage through varied atmospheres” (Guy Debord,

Drift theory). This will allow us to navigate the

unknown waters of the city, to let ourselves be carried by the

currents and surf.

We talked about “London Orbital” by Ian Sinclair. In this

text, whose title summarizes the program, Sinclair revolves around

from London by walking along the M25 ring road, which surrounds the

British capital. He is sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by

visual artists or musicians (Bill Drummond, from the acid house group

KLF). It describes parking lots, gas stations,

supermarkets and dormitory suburbs, but also the fields and

landfills, looking for traces of missing presences and

ancient cults, places which open onto other places. “Sinclair

offers his own version of psychogeography, in which the

urban wanderer, local historian, avant-garde activist and

the political polemicist meet and blend.” (Merlin

Coverley P.150)

Walking in orbit around the city… The metaphor called for being

traveled both with words and with our steps and the poetics of

margin and detours initiated in “our reflections” did not require

than to deploy there. Like the moon, the agencies' stations

spacecraft and other debris gravitating around the earth; he

would be a question for us of becoming satellites of the city:

production of images of unusual areas, seen from the margin

and the periphery… Two beings orbited around a “star

urban" which operates forces of attraction on them and puts them in

movement.

We are irresistibly launched on a trajectory

metaphorical. We will find ourselves in dead ends,

Metaphor

2

impossibility of moving forward and sometimes losing ourselves. “In”

lose" there is the possibility that space dominates the

subject” (Fransesco Careri). We want to test urban planning in

its raw materiality. We are going to walk through all these

places dedicated to car, speed and traffic: airport,

road, path, sidewalk, roundabout, pedestrian crossings, neighborhood,

barrier, public gardens, industrial zones, car parks and

private properties... It's another rhythm that sets in. Walking

opposes rapid flows; it poses as if overhanging the

ordinary users of these places. These places we go

cross but also sleep there, eat there, spend time there,

traveling in the open air, being in the front row of “I don’t know

What… ". We're going to have to get lost, so that here becomes nowhere.

3

We will walk along the Brussels ring road.

This is made up of an oval shape of 75

kilometers which encompasses the entire region of

Brussels-Capital and certain municipalities

peripheral areas of Flemish Brabant and Brabant

Walloon. Its construction extended between 1958 and

1980. The part of the ring which passes through the Soigne forest is

a 9th century roadway which has not been modified.

We will follow this artificial route on foot. We will leave from

zero point which is located at the Haut-Ittre interchange in the southwest

and wind the ring counterclockwise.

watch ; a symbolic way of going back in time. Since the

first step is to commit to a return to the origins of

movement. Our layout will impose an aesthetic form on us

paradoxical: It will put us on the edge of the city by a

arbitrary border both mobile and static: crunchy

rigid concrete and urban lung, channel for the permanent flow of

exchanges with the outside world: automobiles, trucks, human mass

transported and goods.

Equipped with sneakers, we will cover around 150 kilometers. If

the ring is 75 kilometers long, we are going to take detours. Walk,

we will not be able to directly follow this line of bitumen which

tears the landscape into straight lines. The walk will impose on us

detours with always the highway in sight: always at the

both physically close and sometimes distant depending on the

way we will progress.

We will do around 20 kilometers per day. If we will walk

about four to five hours daily we will be busy

the rest of the day with our various explorations. In a

psychogeographic work of census and research, we

let's go see what's hidden at the edge of the ring: we're going

explore the shopping centers, the banks of the Charleroi canal,

the airport area, interchanges, parking lots, areas

housing and rest areas. The Ring is an artery between

the heart of Brussels and the outside, cars circulating

any pace between the outside and the inside. A central artery

supplied by secondary roads at the intersections of

different exchangers. Automotive blood circulates from a need for

consumption to another, from work to housing. A life gravitates

around this artery, an almost invisible life; on the highway

we are just passing by, the landscape passes by at full speed. With the

slowness of walking, we will discover what is grafted

around the ring and meet those who live with the

concrete giant.

"I want to walk along the orbital highway: with the

conviction that this nowhere, this ring road will offer stories

new” (Ian Sinclair)

Brands

4

If we are going to discover little by little certain mysteries around the

ring during our trip, we will also experience the

journey in its temporality because during the seven days that will last

our walk, we will sleep in the space of our route.

At the end of each day, we will set up our bivouac to sleep

waiting for the next day of walking. There will be no

suspension in this exploration. The environment will be with us

day and night. If we are going to discover unsuspected areas,

we will physically experience what such a movement can

make the body endure whether in terms of cold,

humidity and discomfort. “Through fatigue, the body becomes

foreign thing” (Valéry). We will walk like tramps

celestial and the ring will impose itself on us in all these

dimensions.

5

Our progress will be recorded by a

camera and the images will be broadcast live

in an art space.

Continuing the metaphor, the camera will have as

us the presence and movements of a satellite which

follows a trajectory according to an algorithm around a star. This one

is equipped to capture images and retransmit them from

systematic and defined manner in advance. There is no bet

on stage, only the capture of a flow of images and its

continuous transmission without any human intervention. The camera

is used in its most primary function: recording

pictures. Coupled with internet network technology, it is

connected and powers a line.

The camera will be our own satellite, but whose function

would be to film the universe that we are crossing: satellite which

captures the universe around its star and not the star itself.

On a technical level, we will equip the camera on the back

with a 4 cm Velcro strip. 4 Velcro strips to accommodate the

camera will be placed: on the torso, on the left sides and

right of the bag then finally on the back of the bag. These Velcro strips

will serve as an anchor point for camera rotation,

making it discreet, close to the body and quickly moved.

We will physically follow the channel of an urban flow to better

disconnect from it and at the same time we ourselves will be the channel of a

flow. By generating a stream of images, we will engage in a

subversive approach because the flows which cross urban space do not

is not limited to road traffic. Flow control (image,

electricity, food, migration, connection, etc.) is one of the

contemporary security issues: selection, fluidity,

transparency and it conditions the use of urban spaces.

By the presence of a camera transmitting a live image,

we will impose a critical requirement on ourselves, producing a form

of ambiguity quick to question the spectator as well as ourselves:

impose on ourselves what we seek to escape.

Camera-eye, permanent third party and spectator, presence of an otherness

radical and anonymous. What will remain of us? Laboratory rats

released in an urban environment under the eye of observers with reactions

unknown and inaccessible. But unlike rats

laboratory, we will have chosen to submit to

experience. And why do this to yourself? Borderline experience…

Questions arise urgently…

Are we not entering into a form of

sophisticated reality TV? Is this not the expression of a delirium

narcissist of beings encumbered by their contemporary comfort, if

Camera

6

lost that only an extreme and crazy experience looms in

answer ? Is the experience of strangeness becoming, today,

so difficult to access? Shouldn't she remain purely anonymous?

and discreet?

But the camera makes it visible. We're going to brandish, shake this

discreet and contemporary form of control: transparency

digital, geolocation, surveillance, big data analysis,

full traceability of the individual (digital, genetic, etc.),

technological influence established in a social community. " More

democratic, less frightening: shared control establishes

community of voyeurs” writes Frédérique Gros. Inflict on us

permanent presence of the camera is to question the influence of

this form of democratic control over human use of

urban spaces.