…my former ennui had returned and I felt its weight even more heavily than before; I doubted whether attempts at sociability would ever relieve me of it. What I required was not exactly solitude, but the opportunity to roam around freely meeting people when I wished and taking leave of them when I wished… [1]
Travel has always been an innate remedy for my apathy. Often seen as a begrudging necessity of everyday life, travel is an activity to be endured rather than savoured. Although, most journeys are obscured by a veil of paper, a numbing gaze and the desire for privacy in the must public of places. To ensure this privacy the quotidian is prioritised and often exaggerated; shoes become works of art, the patination of the floor an undeciphered chronicle, sleep a placid disguise. We magnify what exists and ascribe our spaces of travel with indeterminate meaning. By saying this, any form of travel generates an architecture; we constantly [re]construct our world by moving through it. For me the banality of travel is an endless source of fascination and research if provided reverence. It is out of curiosity or wilful ignorance that I attempt to get lost during my travels; carrying a crudely drawn map of local landmarks and modes of transit. This method allows for a more truthful exploration, unshackled by pretence and preconception, the journey becomes personal, a series of moments shaped by instinct and interpretation. I don the role of the flâneur. [2]
flânerie and the flâneur.
Flânerie is more specific than strolling. It is a spatial practice of specific sites: the interior and exterior public spaces of the city; parks, pavements, squares, and shopping arcades or centers. While flânerie is an individual practice, it is part of a social process of inhabiting and appropriating urban space by physical presence and desire; to find meaning, to claim knowledge, to study the city for content. What remains an open question is the extent to which the flâneur contributes to the [re]production of a romantic cityscape as they are little more than seekers of mystery amongst banality; a passive spectator who is duped by the spectacle of the public just as the consumer is duped by the promises of consumerism. [3]
It is in this guise that a series of journey’s have been documented, becoming a personal reportage of a search for meaning and order, a fragile order that stands only for that day, those footsteps and fleeting moments.
claiming zollverein.
…whether Zollverein is like this because it is unfinished or because it has been demolished, whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim, I do not know. The fact remains that it has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that makes it seem a city except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be: a forest of pipes that end in taps, showers, spouts, overflows. Against the sky a lavabo’s white stands out, or a bathtub, or some other porcelain, like late fruit still hanging from the boughs. You would think that the plumbers had finished their job and gone away before the bricklayers arrived; or else their hydraulic systems, indestructible, had survived a catastrophe, an earthquake, or the corrosion of termites. Abandoned before or after it was inhabited, Zollverein cannot be called deserted. At any hour, raising your eyes among the pipes, you are likely to glimpse a young woman, or many young women, slender, not tall of stature, luxuriating in the bathtubs or arching their backs under the showers suspended in the void, washing or drying or perfuming themselves, or combing their long hair at a mirror. In the sun, the threads of water fanning from the showers glisten, the jets of the taps, the spurts, the splashes, the sponges’ suds. I have come to this explanation: the streams of water channeled in the pipes of Zollverein have remained in the possession of nymphs and naiads. Accustomed to traveling along underground veins, they found it easy to enter the new aquatic realm, to burst from multiple fountains, to find new mirrors, new games, new ways of enjoying the water. Their invasion may have driven out the human beings, or Zollverein may have been built by humans as a votive offering to win the favor of the nymphs, offended at the misuse of the waters. In any case, now they seem content, these maidens: in the morning you hear them singing…[4]
[1] Keith Tester / The Flâneur / Routledge / 1994
[2] Francesco Careri / Walkscapes – Walking as an aesthetic practice / Testo & Immagine / 2001
[3] Keith Tester / The Flâneur / Routledge / 1994
[4] Italo Calvino / Invisible Cities / Vintage Classics / 2009
timothywaddell 