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