Mondo Mythopoesis: Psychogeography after Situationism

Mondo Mythopoesis: Psychogeography after Situationism
Stewart Home
Performance Lecture, Project Space 176, 21st February 2008

Stewart Home presented a linear narrative of, literally, psychogeography after situationism. This lecture took place in the blank, soundless spaces of a remake Home had produced of a Situationist film which alternates between light & voice and dark & silence. Home’s remake, funnily enough in the spirit of a Hollywood remake of European arthouse cinema, was in colour, so used the colour bars of digital video instead of blanket white.

Home’s view of psychogeography embraced detournement, another Situationist tactic which involved reversing, twisting, or corrupting an existing image, object, or process. One example of this that came up was the work of an Italian group who all collectively used the name ‘Luther Blissett’ in order to create works of art and literature, including a whole novel which has been internationally published. The fame of Luther Blissett was engineered through convincing the Italian media of his disappearance whilst cycling the word ‘Art’ by joining lines through European cities. A documentary team visited Britian, where the fictional persona had apparently been living, and Stewart Home, his best friend, took them to a house on the Isle of Dogs and told them stories of his friend’s life there.

This particular home was being demolished as part of the clearance of certain areas of the Docklands at the time. It belonged, in actual fact, to a man named Richard Essex who had re-established the semi-fictional London Psychogeographical Association and was obsessed with a ley-line running through the Isle of Dogs and connecting to the shape of a pyramid made by expanding the lines of the summit of Canada Tower. The ley-line, in this frame of reference, took on life as a kind of ‘axis of evil’, particularly as it coincided with the physical locations of various BNP activists and events.

In a way the ley-line, however fictional, formed a way of talking about actual tendencies and political movements. It all sounds a bit silly, but I was quite taken with the idea of a non-tangible but somehow real interconnection between related things. And also, that this might be readable in the landscape.

My investigations in Fontainhas have had a similar character. Things that I have been told don’t exist, or don’t relate to anything, often seem to do just that. The springs, for example, are evident across the site even though people don’t seem to believe this to be true. Meanwhile, many of the stories I receive from Fontainhas residents don’t quite ring true in the landscape – there is no evidence for them and perhaps they belong to mythology and romance more than literal truth- and nothing wrong with that because in a way it becomes true.

I want my understanding of Fontainhas to display a similar generosity of spirit to that expressed by Home in this lecture: a willingness to embrace fiction, intangible but palpable relationships, and storytelling.