how to get lost

Trans Artists Monthly AIR mail

No. 23 / A Field Guide To Getting Lost

"Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city as one loses oneself in a forest, that calls for quite a different schooling." Walter Benjamin.

To Walk the City

Last Tourist is an online passage along hand drawn maps, texts and photographs by Dutch artist Jan Rothuizen . This website provides a personal reading of the cities that write themselves. To walk in a city without a set destination is relatively new. It was only in the twenties of the last century that the flaneur emerged, a modern day man who went drifting trough the cities that appeared.

Natural Habitat

Diogene bivaccourbano is a programme for international artists. The selected artist will be hosted in a small housing form (the Bivouac), built in an "interstitial" area of the city, that will become the place where the artist lives and works, experimenting a new way of strong interaction between the urban environment and its community.

The Bivouac has been created using salvaged materials and a survival kit, reducing the needs to what is strictly necessary. It is an attitude that cannot be considered as an extreme survival experiment but rather as a wish to relate to the city, our natural habitat, seeking the essentiality.

• Where: Torino, Italy
• Deadline: May 23

Lost in NYC

• What: Audio Walk with photographs, 46 minutes
• Where: Central Park, New York.
• Download the audiotracks
• here

GET LOST is a collective portrait of downtown New York in the New Museum. Twenty-one international artists were invited to create a personal view of the city and draw a map of downtown New York, uncovering a territory that is both real and imaginary. The maps were collected in a fanzine publication that was distributed for free at galleries, not-for-profit institutions and other sites that animate the life of downtown New York.

New Routes

Artist Eric von Robertson works under the conceptual framework of CARL: The Center for the Advancement of Recreation and Leisure. This evolved in series of field studies that travel between remote and urban landscapes: places where a large inflatable cushion of air is uncontrollably swept through the streets, to a pack of stray dogs sporting custom designed textiles that offer new routes and intersections for "City Guides". Look here at the project Eric did for the Canadien Center for Architecture.

• Canadian Centre for Architecture
• A 3-month residency in Montreal during June, July and August 2010.
• The Power Corporation Award provides a total stipend of $7,000 CAD to cover the travel, housing, and living expenses.

Cities Change Every Hour

• Participate to city 1 minute!
• Cities change every hour. One artist will make a one minute video between 9.00 and 10.00 pm. Another artist between 10.00 and 11.00 pm and so forth. Together they make a portrait of 24 minutes. Together these 24 visions make a collective art work.
• Deadline: 1 october 2009
• Website