Mythogeography for Anyone
If you’ve ever stood in a Cotswold village and been overwhelmed by a feeling of unease…
or stood underneath the Tour Eiffel and seen that it is, wonderfully, quite different from its publicity, all metal and tense elegance…
or been unable to get your mind off the child labourers as you try on something in the big store changing room, there’s something about the fitments that takes your imagination to a village in Sri Lanka…
…If you’ve felt anything like that, then you may be sympathetic to mythogeography – which is the war of the many unnoticed against the few with the power of exposure.
Mythogeography has one weapon – you. It is the stepping and steeping of people in the flows and tugs of all the images around us.
Its central tactic is old-fashioned – walking and journeying.
By setting ourselves in motion through a world of images we make ourselves human movie cameras or camera phones – both interpreters and producers. By the particular focuses and the angles of trajectory we choose, we make an interpretation of our world, and from our impressions we begin to re-make its meanings.
The productions that follow from these experiences – a conversation in a bar, a procession, a conspiracy, a plan, a map, an organisation, a gesture – are what mythogeography is.
It isn’t anything more difficult than that.
By whatever means are necessary, it is the struggle of the differences against the big sameness (dressed in oh so many colours, of course). And those means may be entrepreneurial, may be trespass, may be poetic, may be effete, may be abject, may be disarming, may be perilous, may be made at a cost, may be invisible, may be best unspoken of for the time being, may be both naïve in hope and canny in practice.
Or it may be something quite unthought of yet, which only you can make it.
For advice on revving up your mythogeographical engines by going on a drift, here’s a simple starter kit.
or stood underneath the Tour Eiffel and seen that it is, wonderfully, quite different from its publicity, all metal and tense elegance…
or been unable to get your mind off the child labourers as you try on something in the big store changing room, there’s something about the fitments that takes your imagination to a village in Sri Lanka…
…If you’ve felt anything like that, then you may be sympathetic to mythogeography – which is the war of the many unnoticed against the few with the power of exposure.
Mythogeography has one weapon – you. It is the stepping and steeping of people in the flows and tugs of all the images around us.
Its central tactic is old-fashioned – walking and journeying.
By setting ourselves in motion through a world of images we make ourselves human movie cameras or camera phones – both interpreters and producers. By the particular focuses and the angles of trajectory we choose, we make an interpretation of our world, and from our impressions we begin to re-make its meanings.
The productions that follow from these experiences – a conversation in a bar, a procession, a conspiracy, a plan, a map, an organisation, a gesture – are what mythogeography is.
It isn’t anything more difficult than that.
By whatever means are necessary, it is the struggle of the differences against the big sameness (dressed in oh so many colours, of course). And those means may be entrepreneurial, may be trespass, may be poetic, may be effete, may be abject, may be disarming, may be perilous, may be made at a cost, may be invisible, may be best unspoken of for the time being, may be both naïve in hope and canny in practice.
Or it may be something quite unthought of yet, which only you can make it.
For advice on revving up your mythogeographical engines by going on a drift, here’s a simple starter kit.