Do You Want To Come Walk With Me?
2023
Performative Guided Tour, +-40 min
City Tours throughout different areas in Antwerp, in the character of a typical tour guide.
These tours do not concentrate on the main tourist attractions, but focus on places that might go unnoticed otherwise and that are of a different kind of public interest.
In a city where every place, every street, every building gets a pre-designated function, I search for the spaces in between: places that hold the possibility of change within them.
People got handed out a Pocket Guide For Minor Interventions, in which they could find alternative maps and suggestions on how to claim back public space.
Amongst other, but not limited to, these tours included :
– A playful raising of awareness on the many CCTV-camera’s in the cityscape.
As a part of my research I revised Maarten Inghels’ “Invisible route” from 2017, visually mapping all the CCTV-camera’s along our route. People could find these blind spots in experimental maps in the booklet.
– Live marcations of the camerafree zones with erasable spraypaint
+ the suggestion to dance like nobody is watching.
+ in situ participative interventions, such as aligning in these limited blind spots and taking some meditative “me-time” there.
– A map that pointed out who owns which building within Antwerp (e.g. one person owning 700 houses) + collective labeling of these houses along the route
– A history of playful citizens’ protests against the building boom
